Author: cmbail
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The Longhill drainage ditch, when knickpoints move
Last Fall I started a ‘series’ focused on rivers and their watersheds. Six months have elapsed since that first post and another write up is overdue. Rivers and their drainage networks can conjure up images of adventure, mystery, and perhaps even romance. Consider the mighty Rio Orinoco with its waters plying the jungles of Venezuela…
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Senior Research Saturday 2014
The year-long senior research project is an important piece in the William & Mary Geology major. All W&M Geology majors complete an intensive independent project and in the process create new knowledge about the earth and the environment. The project culminates in a thesis and a professional-style presentation. For the past three years we’ve turned…
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Rolling Deep with the Penrose Conference on Orogenic Systems
This past week I co-convened a Geological Society of America Penrose Conference focused on Feedbacks and Linkages in Orogenic Systems. An orogen is a geologic term for a mountain belt, and orogenesis describes the processes at work in mountain belts (derived from Greek- oros for “mountain” and genesis for “creation/origin”). The world’s great mountain belts…
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50 Hours in the Field: the Earth Structure & Dynamics Field Trip 2014
The 2014 Earth Structure & Dynamics class field trip left Williamsburg at 1 p.m. last Friday bound for the Blue Ridge Mountains and points beyond. We would not return to campus until 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, some 50 hours after our departure. The field trip is a spring tradition that’s been enjoyed by students…
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Working in a Winter Wonderland: The Gravity of the Situation (Part 2)
Last summer I reported on our field research in the High Plateaus of Utah. Erika Wenrich’s senior thesis project involves a gravity survey aimed at estimating the amount of sediment beneath Fish Lake, a large alpine lake developed in a high-elevation graben. In June we measured gravity at a network of stations around Fish Lake,…
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Glimpses of the Past: the Catoctin Formation – Virginia is for Lavas
In 1969 Virginia embraced the travel slogan Virginia is for Lovers and at various times during the last 45 years William & Mary geology students have emblazoned departmental t-shirts with Virginia is for Lavas and turned the iconic heart into a volcano. In that spirit, Geology Fellow Alex Johnson and I wrote a piece on…
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Oman’s Mega-Sheath Folds
Oman is a sunny place and cloudy days are rather uncommon. On Friday, January 10th we awoke to cloudy skies over Muscat. Today was the day to tackle “the exposure” at Wadi Mayh about 25 km (19 mi.) south of Muscat. Wadi Mayh is a through-going drainage that offers tremendous exposures of bedrock in its…
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Dispatches from Oman: Juxtaposition
A new semester awaits 11,000 kilometers away in Williamsburg. Time to depart Oman, but before heading west towards home there was one last mountain to climb. I’ve had my eye on this ridge at the north end of Jebel Akhdar for months, as the view from its crest should provide an exceptional overview of the…
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Dispatches from Oman: Fodder for the Tectonic Cannon
I’ve been in Oman for over ten days and seen plenty of deformed rocks—it is what I came for. What follows are a series of images illustrating deformed Omani rocks: there are folds, faults, fractures, and veins. This stuff is eye candy for a structural geologist. This first photo is a stitched panorama using our…
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Dispatches from Oman: We’re with the Band
After four days of field work in the Western Hajar Mountains, Alex and I returned to Muscat to get clean and then joined up with William & Mary’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. Professor Anne Rasmussen directs this talented group of musicians who’ve been exploring and performing the music of the Middle East since 1994. Seven…
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Dispatches from Oman: Wadi Jizzi – standing at the bottom of the Tethys Ocean
Our travels in Oman took us north from the capital region in Muscat to Sohar, a drive of some two hours along the Batinah Coastal Plain. This coastal plain is just that, a low relief plain sloping towards the Gulf of Oman and underlain by relatively young (Tertiary to Holocene) sedimentary rocks and sediments. The…
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Dispatches from Oman: Ophiolite to Aflaj
The New Year finds me half-a-world away from William & Mary on a research trip to Oman. I am here starting a project focused on Oman’s spectacular geology and also laying the groundwork for a W&M study abroad field program that will focus on Oman’s iconic geology, its desert environment and distinctive culture. This trip…
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Ivy Creek, the Old Stomping Ground
This post begins what I plan to be a recurring series on drainage basins and watersheds. For earth scientists interested in landscapes and surface hydrology: drainage basins are a fundamental component of these natural systems. A drainage basin consists of all the terrain that contributes water to a particular stream or river. For instance, rain…
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Glimpses of the Past: The Rockfish Conglomerate
My family has a tradition of going camping about once per semester. Back in the spring of 2011, as the Appalachians were beginning to green up, we headed west to Rockfish, Virginia for a weekend camping trip to my Uncle Joe’s farm. Joe’s farm is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and…
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Summer Research: Going with the Flow
In April I delivered a talk on “Finding Faults in Old Virginia” as part of William & Mary’s Tack Faculty Lecture Series. Our study of Virginia’s faults is ongoing and one current project is focused on the boundary between the Blue Ridge and Piedmont regions. Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are underlain by a sequence of…
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Summer Research: Introducing the Wayne WonderMonkeys
As I noted in my last post our summer geologic field research took us to the Beehive State. Our work is primarily focused on Wayne County in the south-central part of Utah. Created in 1892, Wayne County forms an expansive rectangular block of nearly 2,500 square miles. The county is sparsely populated with about 2,700…
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Summer Research: The Gravity of the Situation
I’ve just returned to Williamsburg after a month of field research in Utah at Fish Lake and the High Plateaus. I journeyed to Utah with a team of four W&M undergraduates, nicknamed the Wayne WonderMonkeys (more on their name later). June brought copious rain to Williamsburg (more than 25 cm (10”) fell on campus), all…
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Living the Dream: Back to Alberene
Remember the Alberene Dream Team from the summer of 2011? This talented group of undergraduates poured themselves into research projects aimed at understanding the geology of the eastern Blue Ridge Mountains that summer and continued their work as part of their senior research during the academic year. Alex Johnson, the youngest member of the Alberene…