Author: cmbail
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Paddle Trip Report 2 – Across the Piedmont and Fall Zone
At the end of my last post we’d completed the first two days of an 8-day canoe trip from the Blue Ridge Foothills in central Virginia to Williamsburg, and were tucked in on a gravelly island in the middle of the Rivanna River. DAY 3- Rivanna Rain The rain returned during the night. Day 3…
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Paddle Trip Report 1 – Through the Foothills
We successfully completed our 8-day paddle trip from the foothills of the Blue Ridge to Williamsburg. It was all the adventure I’d hoped for. In this first of three posts, I report on the highlights, rough spots, and geology along our journey. This was a personal trip completed with my old friends and goodtime buddies,…
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A Journey Thirty Years in the Making
In 1985 I enrolled at William & Mary. I remember bits of that summer day in which my mother and I made the journey from our home in Albemarle County (west of Charlottesville) to college in Williamsburg. That seems a long time ago. During the past thirty years I have made the journey from Albemarle…
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Endings and Beginnings
William & Mary’s class of 2015 has graduated. On Sunday morning the Geology department held its graduation reception, and the mood was suitably festive as our latest cohort of seniors took possession of their diplomas. As I noted in earlier posts, part of what makes a bachelor of science degree in Geology from William &…
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Over the Hills and Far Away: The Earth Structure & Dynamics Field Trip 2015
The Earth Structure & Dynamics class field trip is a springtime ritual; last weekend we headed over the hills and far away. At our apogee, we were 233 km west-northwest of campus in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. With 43 of us packed into four vans, this was the largest Earth Structure & Dynamics field trip yet.…
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Mystery at Midway Mills (Part 2)
In the last post I described how an old stone mill in the central Virginia Piedmont had disappeared. I discovered Midway Mills’ disappearance on a discouraging and wet field day in July 2012. Despite our first day setbacks, my research student Jacob Rosenthal (W&M ’13) carried on with his project. Ultimately, he discovered the quarries…
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Mystery at Midway Mills
Virginia’s Piedmont is an expansive area of gently rolling terrain whose underlying geology is quite complex. The old metamorphic and igneous rocks of the Piedmont are cut and overlain by a series of basins into which sediment (now sedimentary rocks) accumulated during the Triassic and Jurassic periods (225 to 200 million years ago). These rift…
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Going Low, W&M’s Keck Lab Measures Its Lowest Temperature Ever
The eastern half of the United States is gripped by intense cold, and William & Mary’s campus is wrapped in snow and ice. Earlier today, the Keck Environmental Field Laboratory registered its lowest temperature ever as the thermometer bottomed out at -16.9˚ C (1.5˚ F). The Keck Lab’s weather station has been operating since 2003,…
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Mount William & Mary, Really?
Last week William & Mary News published a story about a second campaign to officially name a peak in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado Mount William & Mary. The mountain in question is a subordinate peak on Mount Elbert, the highest summit in the Rockies, that tops out at an elevation of 14,440’ (4,401…
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The Road to the Moho
I spent last week in the Sultanate of Oman, working with my colleague Professor Anne Rasmussen to setup a William & Mary study abroad program that we’ll run in January 2016. For much of the trip we were based in Muscat, meeting with our Omani colleagues to hammer out program logistics. With each passing day…
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Field Methods 2014: Wrapping It Up
The last day of classes at William & Mary is traditionally a celebratory affair, and on the last day of class this fall we wrapped up the Field Methods course with a rowdy poster session where the results from our three field projects were presented. As I noted earlier this semester, Geology 311- Field Methods…
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Wadi Bani Ghafir at Sidaq Gorge – Water versus Rock in Oman
In January I had the good fortune of visiting Oman to explore the country’s magnificent geology. November 18th is Oman’s National Day and in this post I’d like to celebrate an Omani drainage basin: Wadi Bani Ghafir is a watershed in the mountainous terrain of northern Oman that heads about ~10 km (6 mi.) south…
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Field Methods 2014: Put Your Hiney in the Piney
When many of my academic colleagues (both at W&M and further afield) learn that I write a blog it is commonly followed by an amused grin and a question along the line of “why besmirch yourself with a blog?” In the academy, peer-reviewed publications, primarily in academic journals and books, are the coin of the…
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The Department that Floats Together…
The latest addition of the Geology departmental field trip rolled out of Williamsburg last Friday and then floated down the James River on Saturday. The weather in the Mid-Atlantic region was iffy. A stalled frontal system bolstered an on-shore flow of moist air, but a spot of rain here and there did not deter the…
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SNOMI – The Summer Nighttime Outdoor Misery Index
During the summer academic geologists commonly spend time in the field doing research; it’s one of the great things about studying the Earth. I’m fortunate to work on projects from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to the deserts of Oman, and at many of our field sites we camp while conducting research. This summer, with the…
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The Saddest Affair: A Geologic Perspective on the Battle of the Crater, U.S. Civil War
One hundred and fifty years ago this week a terrible and pernicious battle was fought at Petersburg, Virginia during the American Civil War. In the summer of 1864 the Confederate and Union armies were at a stalemate; dug in and facing each other across a long front. Lt. Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer from…
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Summer Research: Stories from the Microscope
The Buckmarlson Banshees have spent much of the past seven weeks in the field working to understand the geology of the eastern Blue Ridge and western Piedmont. But this past week we came indoors and spent time observing our samples under the petrographic microscope. Earlier in the summer we cut rock samples into small chips…
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Summer Research: Introducing the Buckmarlson Banshees
Try to find Buckmarlson on a map and you won’t have much luck. It’s the newly created place name for our field area in Virginia’s west-central Piedmont. Buckmarlson is a portmanteau word we created based on the names of the three counties in which our geologic studies are taking place: Buckingham, Albemarle, and Nelson counties.…