The routine

It’s that time of year for me… summer’s here, and I’m winding up my duties at NOVA in preparation for some travels. We leave Sunday night for two weeks in Turkey, followed by my regional field geology course in Montana (also two weeks), followed by some family time and mountain climbing in New Hampshire (three [...]

At the edge of the intrusion

Mountain Beltway reader Greg Willis attended my colleague Ken Rasmussen’s Triassic Rift Valley field course last weekend, and sent me this photo of the view inside the Luck Stone diabase quarry in Centreville, Virginia: Here’s an annotated version: Both photos are enlargeable by clicking on them (twice). This quarry chews into rock right along the [...]

A new river graphic

I really appreciated the feedback everyone contributed regarding the river evolution graphic I posted a week and a half ago. The latest offering is from Kyle House, who linked to a couple of nice summary images derived from Stanley Schumm. Because the images were low-resolution, and black and white, I decided to do some re-drafting. [...]

Harpers Foldry

Cleaning out the backlog of photos I haven’t popped up here yet… Here’s three shots from last weekend, of folds (some kinky) which deform Harpers Formation foliation, just south of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: The Harpers is a Cambrian-aged lagoonal mudrock, dated via Olenellus trilobites in Pennsylvania. It is part of a transgressive sequence that [...]

Taking your requests

In a week, I’ll be in Turkey. This is very exciting: Turkey has tons of cool geology, and a modicum of cool history as well. Anyone have any suggestions for stuff I should do/see/visit while there? Anything you particularly want to see geoblogged? Any “assignments”? Lily and I only have two weeks, so we will [...]

Top Ten Park meme

Lockwood started it. He grabs two new lists from National Geographic “Our Amazing Planet“: the Ten Most Visited National Parks and the Ten Least Visited National Parks. Says he: Bold the ones you have visited, and italicize the ones you’ve never heard of before. Most visited: 10: Glacier 9: Acadia 8: Grand Teton 7: Cuyahoga [...]

Overturned bedding at Maryland Heights

The Lilster & I drove out to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, today, and crossed the Potomac River to hike up to the overlook at “Maryland Heights,” which is what they call the Blue Ridge north of the river. On the way uphill, I noticed this nice example of Harpers Formation bedding and cleavage dipping in [...]

Duke Stone

I wrote last fall about my visit to the Duke Quarry, home of a charismatic metavolcanic rock used to face buildings on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Here’s a sample of the “Duke Stone” that I brought back to NOVA, cut, polished, lacquered, and scanned. It’s quite lovely. You can click [...]

DC fossil website is now live

Chris Barr’s informative website of the “Accidental Museum of Paleontology” that can be found in D.C. building stones is now live. You should go and check it out, and if you ever visit the city, you can use it as a guide for your tourism.

The LaHood Conglomerate

The Belt Supergroup is a series of sedimentary strata laid down in the Belt Sea, an inland sea (like modern Hudson Bay) that existed in the northwestern (by present coordinates) part of ancestral North America during the Mesoproterozoic era of geologic time. Estimates of the absolute age of these rocks range from 1470 to 1400 [...]