Category: Study Away
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Summer Research: Stories from the Microscope
The Buckmarlson Banshees have spent much of the past seven weeks in the field working to understand the geology of the eastern Blue Ridge and western Piedmont. But this past week we came indoors and spent time observing our samples under the petrographic microscope. Earlier in the summer we cut rock samples into small chips…
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Summer Research: Introducing the Buckmarlson Banshees
Try to find Buckmarlson on a map and you won’t have much luck. It’s the newly created place name for our field area in Virginia’s west-central Piedmont. Buckmarlson is a portmanteau word we created based on the names of the three counties in which our geologic studies are taking place: Buckingham, Albemarle, and Nelson counties.…
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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…