You are browsing the archive for maryland Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Mountain Beltway.
22 November 2013
Friday fold: metagraywacke from the Billy Goat Trail
Here’s a sample that my Physical Geology students see on their field trip to the Billy Goat Trail:
5 March 2013
Documenting doomed outcrops: Scientists’ Cliffs, Maryland
The community of Scientists’ Cliffs in Maryland is a private community that happens to sit on some of the most amazing fossil exposures in the Coastal Plain. The strata in question are part of the Miocene-aged (~14 Ma) Calvert Formation. The Scientists’ Cliffs outcrops are better than the more famous outcrops at Calvert Cliffs State Park, mainly because of easier access. At the park, you have to hike in a …
10 November 2012
New GigaPans from the M.A.G.I.C. project
My students Chris Johnson and Robin Rohrback have been busy adding to the Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection. Check out a few of these new GigaPan images: link link link link link
2 November 2012
Friday fold: dinner plate
The Friday fold appears on a flat slab along Maryland’s Billy Goat Trail.
26 August 2012
Paw Paw Tunnel GigaPans
A weekend expedition to GigaPan the C&O Canal’s singular Paw Paw Tunnel results in an exposition on Devonian sedimentation, Alleghanian mountain-building, structural geology, and the incision of the Potomac River to produce entrenched meanders.
29 May 2012
Snowball students visit the University of Maryland
The final meeting of my spring semester Snowball Earth class was a field trip to the University of Maryland, hosted by Snowball guru Jay Kaufman, a specialist in chemostratigraphy using stable isotopes. Here, Jay welcomes the class to his wet lab: Doing chemostratigraphy takes lots of samples. Here’s a drawer full of samples from one of Jay’s many field areas: Then it was time for show and tell. Jay brought …
2 March 2012
Friday fold: one from the Billy Goat Trail
Meter-scale fold in metagraywacke layers at the head of Mather Gorge, Maryland shore of the Potomac River, highlighted by differential weathering along the layering. Annotated interpretation: Happy Friday!
14 December 2011
Aligned tourmalines
…in an Archean schist within the Superior Craton. Same outcrop as the criss-crossing dikes I showed yesterday. We’ve got tourmalines on the plane of foliation in the Setters Schist in Maryland, too, but they aren’t aligned like these Canadian tourmalines; instead the Maryland ones are scattered willy-nilly across the plane of foliation, like pencils on a desktop.
16 September 2011
Turbidity in Chesapeake Bay
Hurricane Irene passed this way two weeks ago, and dumped a lot of rain on the mid-Atlantic region and the northeast. As a result, runoff increased, rivers swelled, and sediment was mobilized. Some of that sediment was suspended and transported downstream. On Tuesday, I got this e-mail from my colleague Ken Rasmussen, who took students out on an oceanography field trip to Chesapeake Bay a week after the storm: Was …
7 September 2011
Graded bed from the Billy Goat Trail
Spotted this one Monday on the newly-rerouted section of the Billy Goat Trail’s Loop A, in Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. This graded bed was deposited as a turbidite in the Iapetus Ocean, sometime in the time-frame of 700 to 460 million years ago. It was metamorphosed 460 Ma during the late Ordovician Taconian Orogeny, and that’s probably when the little quartz veins formed, too. Click on it …
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.