Mountain Beltway has relocated

The blog’s new home is nestled into the cozy embrace of the American Geophysical Union. You can find it at this new URL: http://blogs.agu.org/mountainbeltway/ There, Mountain Beltway joins six other independently-authored blogs in what is the first example (in geology, anyhow) of a professional organization hosting a series of blogs whose authors have editorial control [...]

Tavşanlı Zone field trip, part 3

Picking up where we left off last time, we were in some partly-serpentenized peridotite, part of the Burham Ophiolite in Turkey’s Tavşanlı Zone, an ancient tectonic suture. Our next stop on the field trip allowed us to visit some diabase dikes: Here’s a close-up of the right contact of the dike with the host peridotite: [...]

Friday fold: twice-folded turbidites at Black Pond

Today’s Friday fold comes to us courtesy of Gary Fleming, botanist extraordinaire and brother of Tony Fleming, geological Jack of All Trades. Together, the Fleming brothers led a field trip for the Geological Society of Washington. While I was on that field trip, the topic of polyphase deformation came up, which led a couple of [...]

Tavşanlı Zone field trip, part 2

Yesterday, I shared a few thoughts about the first couple of stops on the field trip I took earlier this month from Istanbul to Ankara, prior to the Tectonic Crossroads conference. Today, we’ll pick up with some images and descriptions from the next few stops. After lunch, our next stop brought us to a relatively [...]

Tavşanlı Zone field trip, part 1

Before the Tectonic Crossroads conference two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to participate in a Istanbul-to-Ankara geology field examining the Tavşanlı Zone, a tectonic suture zone where a portion of the Tethys Ocean basin closed. This paleo-convergent boundary is marked by a suite of interesting rocks, including blueschists, ophiolites, and eclogites. I’d like [...]

Birthing a litter of drumlins

Quite appropriately, Glacial Till won the new the latest edition of “Where on (Google) Earth?”, hosted here yesterday. The location I picked is the subject of a new paper by Mark Johnson and colleagues appears in the current issue of Geology (October 2010). It shows a place in Iceland where a piedmont-style outlet glacier called [...]

Where on Google Earth? #215

With a helpful Twitter hint from Ron Schott, I won my second “Where on (Google) Earth?” challenge, the 214th edition of this popular geoblogospheric competition. As a result, I get to host the next one, Where on Google Earth? #215. The aim of the game is to figure out where on Earth this satellite imagery [...]

Friday fold: wavelength contrast

I scored this photo off the Internet more than five years ago, the first time I taught Structural Geology at George Mason University. I failed to note the website I got it from, and now that website has apparently disappeared, at least as far as the view from Google is concerned. If anyone knows the [...]

Rumeli Hisarı

Right after I got to Istanbul on this most recent trip, I took a taxi from my hotel down to the Bosphorus, to check out the Rumeli Hisarı, a fort complex built in 1452 by Sultan Mehmet the II in anticipation of the following year’s siege of Constantinople. It’s constructed at the narrowest point on [...]

Lola, the cartoonist’s companion

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any photos of my supremely helpful cat Lola on the blog, so here you go: Lola loves to sit on paper, so when I break out the sketchbook to start working on my monthly cartoon for EARTH magazine, she sidles right up and stakes a claim. Fortunately, I [...]