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3 July 2014
Bell Canyon’s Permian submarine landslide
What are these Border to Beltway students up to?… Clearly, they are all immersed in their field notebooks, sketching away. This was in March, in west Texas. There must be something worth drawing at this road cut… A clue can be seen on the wall of rock behind them. There, you can find features such as this: And this: And this: Those are outsized clasts of gray limestone in fine-grained …
18 May 2014
B2B 2: the mid-Atlantic phase
Folks, I’m off to lead another field course – so don’t expect much on the blog this week. This is “phase 2” of the Border to Beltway community college field exchange program. In March, over spring break, I took a dozen NOVA students to Texas to team up with a dozen students from El Paso Community College, and now it’s payback time. Our EPCC collaborators are on their way to …
31 March 2014
Hunt’s Hole: Climbing ripples in volcanic surge deposits
Check out the immense climbing ripples preserved in surge deposits at Hunt’s Hole (a maar volcanic crater in southern New Mexico) and imagine the strong currents couples with an extraordinary amount of entrained pyroclastic material.
9 March 2014
Off to Texas
I just wanted to let readers know that posting will be light this week, as I’m down in Texas running my field exchange course with Joshua Villalobos of El Paso Community College. Joshua’s supplying 12 students, and so am I. Together with talented colleagues, we’re aiming to give these students, many of whom hail from traditionally-underrepresented groups within the geosciences, a world-class field experience that will take them from the …
21 November 2013
West Texas / NOVA field exchange in spring semester
Spring break field course: GOL 295 Regional Field Geology of west Texas: March 8 to 15, 2014, and Appalachian Geology: May 19-24, 2014. West Texas and southern New Mexico showcase tectonic, sedimentary, geomorphic, and volcanic features which provide world-class examples of geologic processes. Students in this course will travel to El Paso, TX, and complete field studies of locations in Carlsbad Caverns, the Rio Grande Rift, the Franklin and Guadalupe …
1 November 2013
Massanutten trip double-feature
As soon as I got back from GSA, I had to run two field trips, back to back. Both are the same trip: my Historical Geology field trip to the Massanutten Synclinorium. Here’s yesterday’s crew perched on a moderately-dipping slab of Massanutten Sandstone along Passage Creek: Today, it’s the same routine all over again, though the weather ain’t as purty… Here’s Friday’s group at one of the four Veach Gap …
11 October 2013
Friday fold: below the Dorado Thrust
Here’s a scene from last summer’s Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies course… students examining and sketching some tight folds in Cretaceous strata of the Western Interior Seaway, crumpled beneath the Dorado Thrust (a more southerly equivalent of the infamous Lewis Thrust to the north)… I’ve featured this site before, in a previous Friday fold. Photo courtesy of Tom Biggs, University of Virginia.
28 August 2013
Guest post: The Huckleberry Ridge Tuff in the greater Yellowstone area
This is the third of several guest posts that will appear here this week, all written by students who participated in this past summer’s Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rocky Mountains course. by Matthew Mann University of Virginia The Huckleberry Ridge Tuff is a 2.1 Ma tuff deposit that is centrally located in Yellowstone (Figure 1), but can be found throughout much of the United States (Figure 2). The …
27 August 2013
Guest post: The Belt Supergroup in Glacier National Park
This is the second of several guest posts that will appear here this week, all written by students who participated in this past summer’s Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rocky Mountains course. by Cate Pearson University of Virginia A drive along Going-to-the-Sun Road is an amazing experience for many reasons. To any traveller, the stunning vistas and landscapes are breathtaking. To the more geologically inclined, a journey through Glacier …
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.