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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!
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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!
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 …
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.
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…
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.
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.