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3 April 2010
Diatom time
Today’s EPOD is of a diatom. Seems like as good an excuse as any to share a couple photos of a big brass diatom sculpture from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Finger for scale, but not really, since the sculpture isn’t to scale.
11 March 2010
Folds of New York
Thursday is ‘fold day’ here at Mountain Beltway. Let’s take a look at some folds I saw last weekend in New York City. We’ll start with a bunch seen in the Manhattan Schist in Central Park. Here’s an example of the foliation in the schist. It’s got finer-grained regions and coarser, schistier regions with big honking muscovite flakes. Metamorphic petrologists: Does this correspond to paleo-bedding? (i.e. quartz-rich regions that metamorphose …
10 March 2010
Pyrolusite on a pterosaur
All the photos I posted over the weekend here were via iPhone, and hence not particularly high-quality, despite their excellent geological content. Now I’ve downloaded the photos from my real camera, and have a few good ones to show. Here’s a succession of photos of the same specimen of Pterodactylus longirostrus, each progressively more zoomed in than the last. It’s a late Jurassic pterosaur (140 Ma) from the Solnhofen limestone …
Giant ground sloths
In the American Museum of Natural History: These mylodontids reminded me of Puerto Natales…
Glacial striations, southern Central Park
New York City has some cool geology: Paleozoic metamorphics scraped by Pleistocene glaciers.
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.