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24 April 2020
Friday fold: The geologic map of Pennsylvania
This is such a gorgeous map: Link 0.43 Gpx GigaPan of a geologic map by Berg, T.M., Edmunds, W.E., Geyer, A.R., Glover, A.D., Hoskins, D.M., MacLachlan, D.B., Root, S.I., Sevon, W.D., and Socolow, A.A., (1980) I’ve been organizing a bunch of geologic maps this week for my Historical Geology students, and this is one of the most beautiful. I merged the two halves of the map that were available online …
7 September 2018
Friday folds: Continuing contorted Conestoga carbonates
The first Friday of September calls out for a fold. The Burle Business Park in Lancaster, Pennsylvania has an answer – several of them, in fact!
16 August 2018
A suite of deformational features in Lancaster limestones
In the Landisville Quarry, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, there is a quarry that cuts into Cambrian limestones. (The exact identity of these limestones is apparently a matter of some dispute, but that’s not going to stop us!) I visited the quarry in June on a field trip offered through the NAGT’s Eastern Section annual meeting. We witnessed multiple varieties of deformation there. First off, there was straight-up brittle extension, resulting in bedding-perpendicular …
15 July 2018
Chickie’s Rock, Pennsylvania
A virtual field trip to the deformed quartzites and metaconglomerates of Chickie’s Rock and Sam Lewis State Park in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
13 July 2018
Friday fold: the anticline at Chickie’s Rock
Chickie’s Rock is a prominent cliff of Cambrian quartz arenite (sandstone) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I visited it last month with field trippers at the eastern section meeting of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. One of the aspects of the site is this gentle anticline with axial planar cleavage: The yellow rectangle is my field notebook for scale. Another shot: Happy Friday to all!
9 June 2018
Friday fold: contorted carbonates of the Conestoga Formation
Today, in Millersville, Pennsylvania, on the campus on Millersville University, I saw these contorted carbonates. They are of the Cambrian Conestoga Formation, and I saw them on a NAGT Eastern Section field trip led by Lynn Marquez of Millersville University. This deformation is purported to be Taconian, but it looks very much like Alleghanian deformation in similar aged and composition rocks in Virginia. Interesting!
12 September 2015
New GigaPans from Team M.A.G.I.C.
Hampshire Formation outcrops on Corridor H, West Virginia: link (Marissa Dudek) link (Callan Bentley) Faults in the Tonoloway Formation, Corridor H, West Virginia: link (Marissa Dudek) Conococheague Formation, showing stromatolites and cross-bedding: link (Callan Bentley) link (Jeffrey Rollins) Tiny folds and faults, from a sample I collected somewhere, sometime… oh well, it’s cool regardless: link (Robin Rohrback) Fern fossil in Llewellyn Formation, St. Clair, Pennsylvania: link (Robin Rohrback) Cross-bedding in …
24 April 2013
Native copper from the Catoctin Formation
Another new insight from last week’s visit to the Outdoor Lab was that they have several fine examples of native copper found in float of the Catoctin Formation on their property. Here are a few examples: Classic examples – a bit of malachite in there too, it looks like. I wasn’t totally shocked when I saw these items, since just a month or two ago, I was shown a similar …
23 August 2011
My best flutes
Fellow geobloggers Brian and Eric have been getting all flutey on us lately, so I figure it’s a good time to show my best photo of flute casts: As the annotated copy suggests, this was taken on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike back in March 2008, when four Honors students and I drove up to Buffalo for a northeastern section GSA meeting. The strata are probably Devonian in age, …
29 March 2011
Tillite in outwash
Hoo boy. This one made me yelp… While on the glacial geology of western Pennsylvania trip last Saturday, we visited a gravel quarrying operation. The operators were extracting gravel from a glacial lake delta deposit, and it was full of glacial outwash — sediments washed out from the melting front of the Erie lobe of the Laurentide ice sheet. We were there to look at the Pleistocene features, but several …
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.