Remains of a mud puddle

Last Wednesday, I took a field trip to the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey, but I got distracted by this fine looking display of sedimentary structures in  a dried-up mud puddle in an old quarry. The coin, a Turkish lira, is about the same size as a U.S. quarter. What you’re seeing here are dessication [...]

Dolly Sods

Over the long Labor Day weekend, my fiancée Lily and my friend Seth and I took a three-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia: Dolly Sods is a unique place, a little patch of flora that is more typical of Canada. It sits atop the eastern Continental Divide, and most [...]

Another metamorphosed graded bed

Over the summer, when my blogging access was limited to my iPhone, I uploaded a photo (taken with the iPhone) of a metamorphosed graded bed on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Here’s another one that I saw, further down on the mountain, on the Auto Road (famous for its iconic bumper sticker): Lens [...]

Rocks of Glacier National Park

This is the second of my Rockies course student projects that I wanted to share here on the blog: it is a guest post by Filip Goc. Enjoy! -CB —————————————————————————– The Rocks around Glacier National Park, Montana: Introduction to the formations The geology around Glacier National Park is great for beginners because the area is [...]

Geology of Massanutten Mountain, Virginia

Here’s a new video from Greg Willis, the same guy who brought us a fine video on Piedmont geology. In this new opus (20 minutes), Greg details the geology of the Massanutten Synclinorium (Shenandoah Valley, Massanutten Mountain, and Fort Valley) in western Virginia. WordPress isn’t letting me embed it here, but you should go and [...]

Pristine stratigraphy vs. bioturbated

Beautiful fiancée for scale.

Metamorphosed graded bed

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week: a graded bed metamorphosed via Acadian mountain building: The graded bed starts at the Swiss army knife at left, where you see an abrupt transition between coarse grained metamorphic porphyroblasts (“pseudo-andalusites”) and finer grained quartzite. This was once a mud to sand transition when these were [...]

Uniformitarian

Heat-stressed map of the Chesapeake Bay / Washington, DC region, as seen at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Looks like mudcracks, eh? Similar stresses; similar strains.

New “primary structures” display at NOVA

One of the things I managed this week was to fill up a new display case in our Student Study area with a structural geology display. On one side is primary structures, both igneous and sedimentary….

Falls of the James III: river work

In today’s post, I’ll finish up with my geologic discussion of the falls of the James River in Richmond Virginia, south of Belle Isle. Previously, we’ve examined the bedrock at this location (the Petersburg Granite) and a series of fractures – some faults and some extensional joints – that deform that granite. Now we come [...]