CHUCK'S ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS

Category: Study Away

  • Traipsing across the Piedmont: A Day Trip thru Geology and History

    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…

  • Crabtree Falls and Landscape Disequilibrium in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains

    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…

  • Going with the Flow: Geology’s Fall Departmental Field Trip 2022

    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…

  • A Highland Fling (Part 2): Learning from LiDAR

    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,…

  • The Return of a Tradition – The Earth Structure & Dynamics Class Field Trip

    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…

  • Celebrating People-Miles

    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,…

  • Game of Boxes

    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…

  • A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 3: Going to the South Side

    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,…

  • A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 1: The Rockfish River Watershed

    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…

  • Gladiator Games over the James

    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…

  • Neoacadian Poets in the Blue Ridge

    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…

  • Summer Research: It’s About Time

    Summer Research: It’s About Time

    Mid-summer is here, and it’s been a busy few weeks for my undergraduate research students. The 2018-19 William & Mary Structural Geology & Tectonics Research Group is focused on an array of projects with study sites from Europa (the satellite) to Oman and Virginia. This year we’re working to better understand when significant tectonic events…