Category: Research
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Jamestown and Geodiscovery
Jamestown Island is a low patch of ground in southeastern Virginia that’s witnessed its share of American history. Settler colonists arrived from England in 1607 and sited their fort/town on the island ~40 miles (65 km) upstream from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a foundational location in the American origin narrative – for…
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Aground on the Hampton Bar with the Sea Making a Fair Breach
200 years ago this month, in early April 1823, a ship foundered and sunk onto a shallow sand bar in Hampton Roads, Virginia. On April 5th its loss was reported in the Baltimore Patriot & Mercantile Advertizer which noted that a schooner “laden with stone” went aground on the Hampton Bar “with the sea making…
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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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Bringing Back the Grenville! Preserving Virginia’s Geoheritage
Virginia has a rich geological heritage that stretches back well over a billion years to an era of geologic time known as the Mesoproterozoic. Rocks formed during the Mesoproterozoic are exposed primarily in the Blue Ridge Mountains and its foothills, as well as in curious inliers such as the Goochland domes and in the Sauratown…
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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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Williamsburg’s Grand Canyon: A Modern Marvel Created by Mismanaged Stormwater
Many William & Mary students and some long-time residents describe Williamsburg’s landscape as flat, swampy, and even boring. Indeed, parts of this landscape are flat, and the bottomlands may be swamps (a forested landscape with standing water). But, for those suggesting that the local terrain is all together boring, I suggest a visit to Williamsburg’s…
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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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Game of Boxes
Last week, with a team of undergraduate research students we commenced a Game of Boxes in the wilds of central Virginia. The Game of Boxes is a difficult game, as in a normal year summer field work is a ‘For the Bold’ kind of endeavor. In 2020, with our COVID-19 safety protocols, the challenge was…
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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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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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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…
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Gladiator Games over the James
The Gladstone Gladiators have spent the past two months dividing their time between geological field research in central Virginia and lab research in the Geology department at William & Mary. They’ve made great progress, mapping through the summer heat and, in the process, are working out the complex structural architecture of the Piedmont. Our research…
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The Gladstone Gladiators
The summer research season has arrived at William & Mary. This year, I’m starting a new project in central Virginia with a team of undergraduate students. It is truly at the center of Virginia, as our study region includes the geographic center (more precisely, the centroid) of Virginia at 37.5215° N, 78.8537° W. We’re not…
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Neoacadian Poets in the Blue Ridge
Every spring my Earth Structure & Dynamics class visits the Appalachian Mountains on our weekend field trip. The goals of the trip are twofold: 1) practice doing structural geology in the field, and 2) decipher the geologic history of the Appalachians. It’s easy to achieve the first goal, as over the course of the weekend…
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On the Road Again
Last week much of the William & Mary Geology department hit the road again en route to the Geological Society of America’s Southeastern Section meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s an annual spring ritual for W&M Geology students as this meeting is well-timed and can be the perfect venue in which to present research to…
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Hurrication at William & Mary: from Gloria to Florence
Last week William & Mary closed up shop and students were sent packing due to the threat from Hurricane Florence. This semester I’m teaching Weather, Climate, & Change (GEOL 100) and the Earth’s Environmental Systems (GEOL 110), in both courses we discuss hurricanes (typically at mid-semester). For obvious reasons, Hurricane Week 2018 came early. On…