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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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11 March 2016

Friday fold: disharmony in the Old Lyme Gneiss

Happy Friday – it’s the end of a very busy week for me, and I hope you too are looking forward to a fun and rejuvenating weekend. Here’s your Friday fold – like last week, a guest submission from Joe Kopera: Wowzers; that’s a looker! What are we looking at here? Joe writes: This photo shows geologic mapper and structural geologist Greg Walsh (USGS) explaining disharmonic folding to assembled geologists …

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24 March 2014

Monday migmatite

Here’s a sweet little sample of migmatite (~470 Ma late Ordovician Taconian Orogeny, U/Pb date from zircon), that my students and I spotted last week on the Billy Goat Trail, downstream of Great Falls in Maryland’s metamorphic Piedmont province: Note the white translucent quartz, the orangey (partially kaolinitized and rusty stained) opaque potassium feldspar, and the shreds of biotite torn and tangled between them: I love the fact that I …

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22 November 2012

Rock Cycle II: Metamorphic → Igneous

Migmatite is a special rock that is partly metamorphic and partly igneous. Let’s take a look at it in Part 2 of Callan’s “Transitions of the Rock Cycle” series.

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18 August 2012

Migmacatization

Evelyn put up a cat photo on Geokittehs earlier today, and it reminded me of anatexis, the process of partial melting. Anatexis is my favorite way to produce a migmatite. In this model, the light-colored (felsic) ginger cat is derived from the partial melting of another cat, partly dark (mafic) and partly felsic (ginger). Where the low-melting-temperature minerals have been extracted, the source cat is much darker. Fresh injections of …

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1 March 2012

Sea Point Migmatite

Callan visits the Sea Point migmatite, a contact between intrusive granite and older metasedimentary rocks, along the west coast of South Africa near Cape Town. His guide? None other than AGU Blogosphere blogger Evelyn Mervine of Georneys!

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8 February 2012

“Got migmatite?”

Had this brainstorm a few weeks back (or maybe months?). Been meaning to blog it up, but hadn’t gotten the chance to flesh it out. The geologic map of the Commonwealth comes from Chuck Bailey of William & Mary, who gave me permission to use it for this project. Anyhow – do you think there are enough Virginia geology nerds out there that I could sell these bumper stickers at …

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12 September 2011

Clinker

“Clinker” is an interesting rock type seen in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It forms when a coal seam catches fire, and cooks the rock above and below it, including the potential for partially melting the strata immediately above. Check out a few images of this intriguing rock here.

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18 March 2011

Friday fold: OSF migmatite

Migmatite schist sample from Orange Springs Farm, near Unionville, Virginia, with cm-demarcated pencil for scale. Sample was cut and polished. Here’s what the untreated sample looks like: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDDcLVp_4Ss] Happy Friday. Enjoy your weekend. I’m off to the Northeastern / North-Central joint section meeting of the Geological Society of America today. We’ll see if my time in Pittsburgh gives me enough time to blog or not…

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11 February 2011

Friday fold: Difficult Run fun

The Friday fold takes us to some high-grade metamorphic rocks in the Piedmont of northern Virginia.

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