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14 January 2022
Book report
Six reviews of recent reads, both fiction and nonfiction, most worth your time.
12 January 2022
Worlds in Shadow, by Patrick Nunn
Callan reviews a book which sets out to perform a comprehensive accounting of submerged lands through the lens of science, but also with an anthropological emphasis on memory and memory’s longer-lived but more flamboyant cousin, mythology.
30 December 2021
Footprints: In search of future fossils, by David Farrier
Callan reviews Scottish author David Farrier’s nonfiction exploration of humanity’s signatures on the geologic record.
12 November 2021
Friday fold: Raven’s Ridge
Happy Friday, all! Two shots today from my friend Joe up in Vermont. He sends these from the Champlain Valley, at a place called Raven’s Ridge. It looks like an alternating series of sandstones and shales, arched into an anticline, perhaps during the Acadian Orogeny (??). According to the Nature Conservancy’s website, porcupines live in this anticline, which is called “The Oven.” Looks like most of the strata around there …
25 June 2021
Friday fold: The Blue Ridge Tunnel
Inside the Blue Ridge (in an 1850s-era railroad tunnel), Callan finds folds and boudinage that formed during Appalachian mountain-building.
16 May 2021
A Brief History of Earth, by Andrew H. Knoll
A review of Andy Knoll’s newly-published book, “A Brief History of Earth: Four billion years in eight chapters.”
7 May 2021
Friday fold: Lynchburg Group
On his way to get his COVID vaccine, Callan visits a new outcrop showing folded and faulted strata of the Neoproterozoic Lynchburg Group.
16 April 2021
Friday fold: Colorado cluster
Friday means folds –
This week, we head to the Colorado Rockies for a butterfly-like presentation of a ptygmaticly folded granite dike within biotite schist.
18 January 2021
Book report
Four recent reads: on starts, near-future technology, fictional far-future adventure, and the geology of the Archaean Eon.
11 September 2020
Friday fold: Boscastle, Cornwall
A hilly region of Cornwall, U.K. features beautiful folding, and a fuzzy field assistant!
Callan Bentley teaches 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.