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17 November 2023

Friday fold: Floor paver in the Atlanta airport

On my way back to Virginia from Hawaii, I had a three hour layover in the Atlanta airport. There, I spotted this charismatic stone paver on on the terminal floor. It showed folds, and so I snapped a photo, but it also shows plenty more… An annotated copy: Happy Friday, all!

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15 September 2023

Friday fold: Candler Formation

On a birding hike yesterday morning, I found this: This is a little slab of kinked phyllite of the Candler Formation. This metamorphic rock started as mud (and ash) deposited atop the Catoctin Formation, and it was later squeezed and heated during Appalachian mountain-building, encouraging the growth of micas at the expense of clay. A strong differential stress made sure those micas grew in one preferred orientation, and that resulted …

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9 June 2023

Friday fold: Pleasant Grove Park

Happy Friday, friends. Here’s a rock sample that I recently polished up: It shows crenulations in “pinstriped” schist of the western Piedmont in Pleasant Grove Park in Fluvanna County, mapped as the Mine Run Complex. Lovely stuff, eh?

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17 March 2023

Friday fold: Pinto Gneiss, varnished and un-

Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Pushawalla Canyon in the Indio Hills region of southern California. There, my colleague Kim Blisniuk (San Jose State University) led our students through an exercise mapping alluvial deposits as a way of constraining offsets along the Mission Canyon strand of the San Andreas Fault. I noted that much of the alluvium was sourced to the northeast, to the Little San Bernardino Mountains. …

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3 February 2023

Friday fold: Kyanite quartzite

A return to the “video Friday fold” format:

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2 December 2022

Friday fold: Hidden Rock Park, Goochland County

Two weeks ago was the annual Virginia Geological Field Conference, which was centered this year on the Goochland Terrane, an interesting block of crust in the Piedmont which shows some similarities to the Blue Ridge geologic province, but also shows some differences that suggest it’s not just a mini-Blue-Ridge. One of the best exposures was in Hidden Rock Park, where a series of “whaleback” outcrops expose things like this: There, …

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18 August 2022

Quarrying soapstone

Earlier this summer, I was lucky enough to visit a soapstone quarrying operation in Schuyler, Virginia, right on the Albemarle/Nelson County line. These soapstone bodies are metamorphosed ultramafic intrusions into the Neoproterozoic sedimentary deposits of the Lynchburg Group. The protolith peridotite sill crystallized at ~580 Ma, meaning the host sediments are older than that (but younger than the Grenvillian basement complex that underlies both). Then both plutonic rock and sedimentary …

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16 August 2022

Kinked metavolcanics of the Castine Formation, eastern Maine

Callan shares a few outcrops from coastal Maine, part of the Avalonia terrane that accreted to ancestral North America during the Acadian Orogeny. They are volcaniclastic rocks, coarse and fine, and showing both overprinting kink bands and cross-cutting basaltic dikes.

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16 April 2021

Friday fold: Colorado cluster

Friday means folds –
This week, we head to the Colorado Rockies for a butterfly-like presentation of a ptygmaticly folded granite dike within biotite schist.

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29 January 2021

Friday fold: revisiting the Geoscience Communication Pardee Symposium

I have two Friday folds for you today, both by geovisualizers who contributed to the 2019 Geological Society of America Pardee Symposium on Geoscience Communication in Phoenix, Arizona: The first is a painting by talented geoartist Emma Theresa Jude, showing a fold at Caithness, Scotland. The fold in question can be seen at the site of Figure 5 of this paper. I love Emma’s art. What other lovely folds have you …

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