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14 May 2012
Hiking Cory Pass
Callan and his wife hike Cory Pass in Banff National Park, Canada, and encounter some geology, some solitude, and a spectacular landscape.
12 March 2012
Views of the Deep Springs Basin
A few shots from a week ago today, when my students and I were exploring the White Mountains of eastern California, just west of the Deep Springs Basin…
7 March 2012
Scenes from last Sunday: Bishop Tuff and Volcanic Tableland, CA
Sunday was our first full day in the field. Here’s a few looks at my NOVA students doing geology out in eastern California. We spent the day on, and next to, the Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, a massive stack of ash fall and ignimbrite deposits erupted from Long Valley Caldera 760,000 years ago: the Bishop Tuff. Climbing the southern edge of the Volcanic Tableland from the erosional valley of …
19 February 2012
Plane views
A few scenes out the left side of the airplane from when I flew from El Paso to Houston a week and a half ago… Sand dune field overprinting desert vegetation and human roadways: Outcrop pattern of horizontal strata (tracing out the contours of this hill), and the weird geometry of human road systems: More contour-hugging outcrops of horizontal strata, and a vertical joint set: Same thing: Bajada (apron of …
28 January 2012
Two new bugs
Got access to the wife’s photos from South Africa. Here are two other charismatic insects:
26 January 2012
The mixed-up quartzites of Cape Agulhas
Callan and his wife journey to Africa’s southernmost point, and find a geological mystery there.
25 January 2012
Berlin Falls, South Africa
Here’s where to find it, if you want to. Can’t say I recommend it – just an overlook, with no opportunities to hike or swim or explore in any more detail than just passively observing gravity exert its pull on water unencumbered by underlying rock.
24 January 2012
Paleoproterozoic stromatolites from the Malmani Dolomite (Transvaal Supergroup)
After our safari, Lily and I were taken up onto the Great Escarpment in northern South Africa. The escarpment is supported by sedimentary strata of the Transvaal Supergroup that overlie the Archean basement rock of the Kaapvaal Craton. The Transvaal strata are Paleoproterozoic in age, somewhere between 2.5 and 2.0 billion years old. They are a mix of siliciclastic sediment and carbonates. Here’s the view from an overlook dubbed “God’s …
23 January 2012
An ancient delta at the Three Rondawels?
Here’s a look at what you see if you go to the Three Rondawels viewpoint above the Blyde River Nature Reserve in northern South Africa: A lovely scene. The three mega-hoodoos on the left are the eponymous “rondawels” (pronounced ron-da-vulz), which is the Afrikaans word for a round hut. These erosional remnants are more or less cylindrical and of the same dimensional ratio as the huts, so this name seems …
20 January 2012
Friday fold: one from Romney (West Virginia)
Last weekend, my wife and I joined friends for a weekend of cross-country skiing in the wonderful Canaan Valley of West Virginia. On the way back, between the towns of Burlington and Romney, West Virginia, I saw this folded shale on the north side of Route 50: You can click on that panorama to make it a thousand pixels tall, if you want to explore it a bit. There are …
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.