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5 July 2012
Floe Lake hike
Last summer, my wife and I spent some time in the Canadian Rockies. One of the things we did was to take a three-day backpacking trip to Floe Lake, in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. We picked a rough couple of days for hiking – We got a lot of Canadian Rockies precipitation out there: we got rained on, hailed on, and snowed on during those three days. Here’s our …
22 March 2012
Plane views
Here are some photos out the window of my flight home from California the week before last… Snow on the north sides of mountains, but not on the south sides (view is from the south towards the north): Same thing here: And again… And again… it would appear that our route from Reno to Minneapolis had us routed over the northern hemisphere! Variation on the same theme: light-colored sand deposits …
13 March 2012
Elevation 10,000 feet
White Mountains, California. Photo (and animated GIF) by Filip Goc. A little silliness for your Tuesday morning.
6 March 2012
Plane views
Some views from the airplane, over southern Wyoming (first two photos) and north-central Nevada (last four), last Saturday morning… A canyon: …and zooming in to the middle area of the previous photo: Strata upwarped into a structural dome (that has been “planed off” to be topographically horizontal, revealing a bull’s-eye-shaped outcrop pattern, then differentially weathered and highlighted by snow: Salt flat (playa lake + playa) in the Basin & Range …
15 January 2011
Snowy detachment
I think snow can act as a nice analogue for larger-scale rock deformation. I explored this a bit last February, and I was reminded of it again last week, when I walked to my car one morning and saw this: Notice how the slab of snow on the hood (“bonnet” for British readers) of my Prius has slid en masse down”hill,” leaving the top portion of the hood bare of …
7 January 2011
Friday fold: snow on a roof
The weekly example of a fold is especially… “cool” this week.
24 February 2010
Snowy décollement
Earlier in the month, during the big snowstorms, my window got plastered with snow. This snow formed a vertical layer which then deformed under the influence of gravity. Looking at it through the glass, I was struck by how it could serve as a miniature analogue for the deformation typical of a mountain belt. Let’s start our discussion by taking a look at an iPhone photograph of the snow: So …
10 February 2010
Snoverkill, 4pm
A look out the back window as DC breaks its annual snowfall record…
8 February 2010
Normal fault in hedgetop snow stratum
Intersection of 16th Street and Columbia Road NW… … a wee bit underexposed, eh? Guess the high albedo blew out my iPhone camera. (glove for scale)
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.