Category: Research
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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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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…
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Water Gaps- worth a voyage across the Atlantic
Water gaps are intriguing and iconic landforms that have long drawn humans to them. We are all familiar with streams and rivers flowing in valleys; a water gap is dramatically different- it’s a place where a river cuts though a ridge or mountain range. Thomas Jefferson discusses the Potomac River water gap in his Notes…
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A Field Day
It is a rare weekday when I can slip away from the College. Yesterday with my colleague Brent Owens and research fellow John Hollis we played hooky and went to the field. Three weeks from now Brent and I will be leading a field trip for the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting: Traversing suspect…
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When Mountains Move
My first post as a W&M blogger came after our Utah field season during the summer of 2008. Indeed, we lived the high life that July, conducting geologic research on the Fish Lake Plateau, a broad and broken highland situated nearly 2 miles above sea level. My undergraduate research students: Trevor Buckley, JoBeth Carbaugh, and…
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Searching for Hylas
We are deep into the spring semester and my teaching/administrative duties are gobbling up most of my weekdays and nights. There is hardly a moment for research during the week, so research gets done on the weekends. I spent this past Saturday in the field searching for Hylas, the Hylas Fault Zone that is, not…
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Whose Fault is It? The 2011 Virginia Earthquake (Part 2)
In my last post I discussed the Virginia earthquake that shook eastern North America on August 23rd, 2011. Here is the second part of that story: unfortunately the answer to the question I pose in the title is not particularly satisfactory. We cannot answer the question about whose fault is it (or more precisely which…
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All Shook Up! The 2011 Virginia Earthquake
As the year comes to a close it is a fine time to reflect on the 2011 Virginia earthquake. It’s been four months since the Virginia earthquake jolted eastern North America, and we now know more about what happened. This moderate-size (Mw=5.8) quake–felt by millions of people from Alabama to Quebec–caused significant damage in Louisa…
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Blue Ridge Rocks: the microscopic view
The Alberene Dream Team spent the summer of 2011 in the field working to understand the geology of the eastern Blue Ridge. As summer turned into the fall semester, the team compiled their data and started to analyze the buckets of rocks we’d collected during the field campaign. In the Geology Department we cut rocks…
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Frost on the Pumpkin
Fall has reached its full crescendo in Williamsburg; leaves are a riot of orange, scarlet and russet, the temperature has dropped, and frost has been sighted on more than a few pumpkins. The National Weather Service has officially declared the 2011 growing season over. The growing season ends when the first freeze occurs (i.e. the…
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Mountain Mayhem
As I’ve noted in these posts before, Geology Departmental field trips are unique as they bring together the W&M geologic community in a way that staying on campus never could. The Fall Field trip took an enthusiastic crew of students and faculty to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a weekend getaway. Our timing was just…
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Hark Upon the Gale! The Hurricane Irene Report
Hurricane Irene raked North America’s East Coast and put a kibosh on the start of William & Mary’s Fall semester. Students were sent packing to safer locales while most faculty and staff hunkered down in Williamsburg. Irene delayed opening convocation by a week, but last Friday the choir belted out a spirited version of William…
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It’s Not My Fault
This afternoon, our Geology faculty meeting was adjourned by a motion from the floor. A 20-second motion from the floor, but more to the point, a 20-second motion from the Earth. Virginia and the East Coast experienced a moderate, but widely felt earthquake at 1:51 p.m. (local time). It was quite a jolt. The earthquake’s…