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26 January 2011
Ken Rasmussen is outstanding faculty!
This is from an e-mail I just got from Dr. Robert Templin, the President of Northern Virginia Community College, in reference to my colleague Ken Rasmussen: Dear Colleague, I am very pleased to share with you the news that Dr. Kenneth Rasmussen, Professor of Geology at the Annandale Campus, is a recipient of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award for 2011. This award, sponsored by Dominion and administered by the State …
20 January 2011
A warm, glowing feeling
Just got this in an email: “Hi professor Bentley, This is [redacted], I had you for Geology last Spring. I just wanted to email you to first off, thank you, and second off, to ask some questions. Before I took your class Science was my worst subject , and I did everything to avoid taking it. I ended up needing it so I chose Geology since i was very slightly …
2 December 2010
How to make a Grand Canyon in seven easy steps
This series of cartoon images ended up on the board yesterday in Historical Geology lab… E = erosion D = deposition Yes, oversimplified: I didn’t include the newest thinking about the subtleties involved in putting together the Brahma and Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granite, and I didn’t include mention of faulting (either ancient or more recent). And no mention of magmatism – either of the Cardenas generation, or the more …
17 November 2010
Fall at NOVA Annandale
Just to share the autumn color wonder that the east coast can be… here’s a shot of our “lake” on campus from the week before last.
22 June 2010
At the edge of the intrusion
Mountain Beltway reader Greg Willis attended my colleague Ken Rasmussen’s Triassic Rift Valley field course last weekend, and sent me this photo of the view inside the Luck Stone diabase quarry in Centreville, Virginia: Here’s an annotated version: Both photos are enlargeable by clicking on them (twice). This quarry chews into rock right along the contact between a mafic igneous intrusion and lake sediments that formed when water pooled in …
7 June 2010
A day in the field
I spent last Thursday on a long field trip in the Valley and Ridge province of northernwestern Virginia. Leading the trip was Dan Doctor of the USGS-Reston. Accompanying Dan was a UVA environmental science student named Nathan. And the NOVA crew rounded it out: professor Ken Rasmussen from the Annandale campus, associate professor Victor Zabielski from the Alexandria campus, and me. We met at the Survey at 9am, and headed …
22 May 2010
New "secondary structures" display at NOVA
…. And on the other side, we have secondary (tectonic) structures, focused on folds and faults:
New "primary structures" display at NOVA
One of the things I managed this week was to fill up a new display case in our Student Study area with a structural geology display. On one side is primary structures, both igneous and sedimentary….
7 April 2010
The working life
It’s a rough life, working in the places I have to work… here are a few photos from yesterday’s field trip on the Billy Goat Trail with my NOVA Physical Geology students. Photos are courtesy Dr. Meg Coleman, who joined us for the hike. A post-lunch lecture on river incision (note the two prominent bedrock terraces, a.k.a. “straths” in the background): The crew climbing the dreaded “Traverse” section of the …
26 March 2010
A day in the life
This month’s Accretionary Wedge is being hosted by Ed over at Geology Happens. Ed asks the rest of us a simple question, “What are you working on now?” Gosh, where to start? It’s a busy time for me, but then again, it almost always is. I spent last week immersed in the NE/SE GSA section meeting in Baltimore, and on the post-meeting “Transect Trip” across the Blue Ridge and Valley …
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.