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17 November 2011
Shear zone in basement complex
Callan visits a new outcrop of highly-sheared rocks in the basement complex of Virginia’s Blue Ridge province.
1 November 2011
Geoblogs as a device for student engagement
Here’s the talk I gave at GSA last month: [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXt5aZIu5Xk”] It’s presented here at a slower pace than the actual talk was, since I didn’t have to run and catch a plane 45 minutes after presenting it, but there are some PowerPoint bugs with some of the animations. Oh well – recording it and putting it online is more than 99.9% of GSA presenters ever do to share their …
13 September 2011
More earthquake damage
These are all in the northern stairwell between the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Godwin Building here on the Annandale campus of NOVA. The cement blocks have clearly separated along their mortared edges, and the disruption of the paint layer in a series of en echelon fractures reveals that deeper structural issue. I find this a bit scary. I have no information about what, if anything, is being done …
27 June 2011
Team Rockies 2011
Our field class visited the Museum of the Rockies yesterday. Here’s the full team!
13 June 2011
Rockies stratigraphic column checklist
I just drew up a little checklist for the different formations my Rockies students will be seeing next starting next week out in Montana: The original black and white images (two columns on two pages) come from Self-Guided Field Trips Near Bozeman (1982), by Stephan G. Custer, Donald L. Smith, Molly Walker, and 1982’s crop of geology graduate students at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. This stratigraphic column, which …
19 May 2011
Check out my bookshelf
A fresh gigapan, of my office bookshelf. There’s some rocks there: Find anything neat?
8 March 2011
A couple other Montana shots
Friday’s prompt to post the French Thrust shot gave me the opportunity to dig into my “Rockies” folder a bit. Here’s two other shots from my inaugural summer leading my Geology 295 field class out there. Hiking the trail to Grinnell Glacier: …It looks like we’re in the Appekunny Formation here, third from the bottom in the stack of Belt Supergroup strata at Glacier. In the distance, you can see …
16 February 2011
Outcrops of the LaHood Conglomerate
Remember the LaHood Conglomerate? Here’s a few field photos of my Rockies class visiting it last July: Amphibolite clast: Marble clast: I love how well-rounded these clasts can be — like eggs. When these grains were loose cobbles, tumbling down into the Belt Sea, the Earth was only 3 to 3.5 billion years old. The rivers which carried them downhill flowed past a landscape devoid of plants and animals. Since …
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.