Raider of the Lost Anticlines
26 March 2018 16:24 in 3D, folds, gigamacro, gigapan, home, structure, trace fossils, valley and ridge, virginia by Callan Bentley
A solo hike in search of anticlines yields new outcrops and good views!
26 March 2018 16:24 in 3D, folds, gigamacro, gigapan, home, structure, trace fossils, valley and ridge, virginia by Callan Bentley
A solo hike in search of anticlines yields new outcrops and good views!
6 February 2018 13:38 in GEODE, gigapan, m.a.g.i.c., tech by Callan Bentley
I love the idea of high-resolution imagery that users can explore for geological meaning from the comfort of their computer screens, tablets, or phones. I think that 3D models and gigapixel-resolution panoramas (GigaPans) are powerful media for connecting people with the Earth. They allow improved access for many populations. Long-time readers will report that I regularly used to embed GigaPans in this blog as part of the stories I tried …
23 January 2018 12:51 in faults, home, quartz, sandstone, sediment, silurian, structure, valley and ridge, virginia by Callan Bentley
On a family hike, Callan’s son finds some interesting smooth lines on a rock. What are they? What do they tell us? Tune in for a brief history of Appalachian geology.
1 January 2018 12:32 in birds, home, virginia by Callan Bentley
New year’s day is the time I tally up my accumulated bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain. This is my sixth such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) Here we go, in chronological order of first appearance in our yard: Red-tailed hawk Red-bellied woodpecker Mourning dove Raven …
13 February 2017 12:46 in astronomy, geomorphology, Q&A, sun, valley and ridge, virginia, weathering by Callan Bentley
A new edition of “science and nature question and answer.” This week: why Massanutten Mountain isn’t longer, and why you’re never going to walk on the Sun.
18 February 2016 12:15 in rivers, sediment by Callan Bentley
A couple of weeks ago, before a series of snowfalsl altered my daily work routine in a destabilizing way, I took a walk through the braided floodplain / gravel fan of Passage Creek, where it exits the Massanutten Mountain system near the state fish hatchery. There, no longer restrained by the steep walls of quartzite, the creek’s water can expand during flood times over a broad forested plain of channel …
23 December 2015 13:17 in arthropods, devonian, fossils, GEODE, gigapan, primary structures, sediment, silurian, trace fossils by Callan Bentley
It’s been a week and a half since Mountain Beltway has seen any publishing action, given the overlapping timesucks of the AGU Fall Meeting and the end of the semester. But now I’m back in the Appalachian mountain belt, and my grades are all in, and I have time to think about indulgences like blogging again. Let me make up for it now with a suite of four new macro …
5 October 2015 12:12 in gmu, ordovician, sediment, silurian, trace fossils, valley and ridge, west virginia by Callan Bentley
Route 33 in Pendleton County, West Virginia cuts across the lower Paleozoic stratigraphic section. I went there this past spring on a sedimentology and stratigraphy field trip with the GMU sed/strat class. The trip was orchestrated by professor Rick Diecchio. Here are some scenes from two of the stops – the upper Ordovician Juniata formation (red sandstones and shale intepreted as Taconian molasse) and the overlying Silurian Tuscarora Formation (thick …
22 September 2015 16:59 in folds, gigapan, lidar, rivers, valley and ridge, virginia by Callan Bentley
New LiDAR imagery for the Fort Valley reveals bedrock structures and subtle aspects of fluvial geomorphology.
6 April 2015 19:48 in devonian, GEODE, gigapan, m.a.g.i.c., primary structures, shale, trace fossils, valley and ridge, virginia by Callan Bentley
Recently, I posted about an excellent road cut in Fort Valley showing well-developed 10 cm+ Zoophycos trace fossils. Presented here are three new GigaPan images (two outcrop; one macro) of Zoophycos from the Devonian-aged Mahantango Formation: link link link These images are part of a new “virtual field trip” that I organized to supplement my historical geology field trip to examine the geologic history of the Massanutten Synclinorium. The link …