Category: Academics
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Traipsing across the Piedmont: A Day Trip thru Geology and History
The W&M Geology Departmental Spring field trip left the Atlantic Coastal Plain last Sunday morning for a quick dash westward into the Piedmont: a day trip with equal measures of geology and history in the mix. As is our tradition, W&M undergraduates conducting research in a particular area lead the trip which is open to…
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William & Mary Returns to Oman
In January 2020, I co-led the William & Mary study abroad program to Oman (commonly known as Rock Music Oman). As we returned home from that program, little did we know that we were weeks away from a pandemic that would shutter the world and effectively limit global travel for over two years. It’s January…
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Crabtree Falls and Landscape Disequilibrium in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains
Back in October, early on a Saturday morning my Earth’s Surface Processes students loaded into vans and we headed west to the Blue Ridge Mountains for our weekend class field trip. All total, there were 52 of us on the field trip in six vans – we were rolling deep. Our first stop was at…
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Going with the Flow: Geology’s Fall Departmental Field Trip 2022
Last weekend the Geology Department set forth on our Fall departmental trip for a geological field trip down the James River in canoes. The late summer weather was glorious, and the James River’s flow was just right– not too high and not too low. On Friday evening, our crew of 22 camped along the James…
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A Highland Fling (Part 2): Learning from LiDAR
The Field Methods class finished our late Winter/early Spring fieldwork at William & Mary’s Highland in March. Over the course of four field excursions, we put in ~530 people hours at Highland – learning to do science in the field and ultimately collecting data on vegetation, soils, water, and rocks (of course). Since Spring Break,…
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The Return of a Tradition – The Earth Structure & Dynamics Class Field Trip
An important tradition in my academic life is the Earth Structure & Dynamics class field trip. This weekend trip takes William & Mary students across the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains to examine the geology underfoot in the Appalachians and, along the way, practice doing geology in the field. I’ve been running this trip for…
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A Highland Fling (Part 1)
The new semester at William & Mary is well underway and after this weekend, we’re off and running with the Field Methods in the Earth & Environmental Sciences course. In contrast to previous years, this edition of Field Methods is focused on only one location – William & Mary’s Highland, once the home and estate…
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Celebrating People-Miles
Earlier this month, on a research trip to central Virginia, the Geology department’s venerable 12-passenger van rolled on beyond 100,000 miles- that’s a milestone worth celebrating. The department acquired this GMC Savana 3500 in the late winter of 2006, and 15 years later it’s got the scars worthy of a long and prosperous career. Yet,…
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Twenty for 2020
The starkness of the past two months has provided ample time to reflect on what makes the academic enterprise at William & Mary special and what’s been lost during this crisis. I’d like to finish the academic year with a photo essay that illustrates the spirit of our community and the wonder of research discoveries.…
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Geological Field Tripping in Cyberspace
Early April is the time when my Earth Structure & Dynamics class ventures to the Appalachians for a weekend of learning and intellectual companionship. I’ve reported on these academic adventures in this blog many times1. Over the course of two days we roll across Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge and out…
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When the Research Road Turns Rough
COVID-19 has shuttered the academic world. At William & Mary, teaching goes on as technology enables us to connect in new ways with our students. But online learning is a poor substitute for what happens in the classroom, lab and field. We’ll manage, and my faculty colleagues are focused making things right for students during…
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Williamsburg’s Colonial Climate: What Can Be Learned from Thomas Jefferson’s Data?
The coronavirus pandemic has turned the modern world on its head, and for the remainder of the 2020 spring semester William & Mary will teach its courses from a distance. This won’t be easy, and the instruction is not going to equal the in-class or the in-lab experience that would normally take place. As I…
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Gladiators Rule! The 2020 Spring W&M Geology Departmental Field Trip
The Geology department rolled out of Williamsburg last weekend and headed straight to Virginia’s geographic centroid for a wide-ranging field trip. It was the spring semester version of the Geology departmental field trip that’s open to all and free to attend. As always, we were rolling deep with more than 45 of us spread across…
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Rock Music Oman 2020 – The Crescent of Learning
I’m homeward bound after the 2020 edition of our Natural History & Contemporary Culture of Oman (a.k.a. Rock Music Oman) course. For the past two weeks, 23 intrepid W&M students joined us for a scholarly, but adventurous, study tour across the Sultanate of Oman. This year’s course was spectacular, but distinctly different than previous years’…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 4: Spy Rock
Once again, the 2019 Geological Field Methods class was on the move this past weekend. We were on a mission to collect a suite of samples for isotopic dating that will help us better understand the geologic history of the ancient rocks that underlie the Blue Ridge. The high point of our day (both literally…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 3: Going to the South Side
Moby, the American musician with a wide-ranging and stylishly downtempo sound, released an exceptional album entitled Play in 1999. My favorite song is South Side, here’s a short snippet of the lyrics … we ride all day looking out for a sunny day here we are now going to the South Side Two decades later,…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 2: Flowing Low and Flying High
Earlier this summer I reported on the Gladstone Gladiators’ ‘games’ on and over the James River, all part of our research campaign to decipher and map the geology in the central Virginia Piedmont. On that trip, we used a drone to acquire aerial imagery of rock structures exposed in the river bottom while we paddled…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 1: The Rockfish River Watershed
Note: this is the first installment in what will be a frenzy of posts about recent fall field trips in the William & Mary Geology department. This semester, one of the courses I’m teaching is Geology 311- Field Methods in the Earth Sciences. As the name implies we venture to the field to collect our…