Tag: Blue Ridge Mountains
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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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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 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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Comfortably Disoriented in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Note: this post was written last September after the Fall 2015 Geology Department field trip, however it never got posted. As the Spring semester comes to a close I thought it was time to stop being a slacker and post this long overdue field trip report! Last week I spent much time at administrative meetings…
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Glimpses of the Past: the Catoctin Formation – Virginia is for Lavas
In 1969 Virginia embraced the travel slogan Virginia is for Lovers and at various times during the last 45 years William & Mary geology students have emblazoned departmental t-shirts with Virginia is for Lavas and turned the iconic heart into a volcano. In that spirit, Geology Fellow Alex Johnson and I wrote a piece on…
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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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The Alberene Dream Team
The summer of 2011 will not be a quiet one in the Geology Department. In addition to a full complement of Geology majors working on research, the department is abuzz with construction as we convert the geology library into a new and commodious classroom. More than a dozen Geology majors are currently on campus collecting…
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Who’s unconformable (Part 2)?
It took well over a week to crawl out from under the pile of 170 final exams, a ‘gift’ delivered by my Geology 110 course, but the grading is now done and the holidays are here. This quick post draws to a close the research that my structural geology seminar completed. Recall that the seminar…
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Who’s unconformable?
I spent the spare moments over Thanksgiving break working to complete a geologic map of the Big Run watershed in Shenandoah National Park. Fun stuff. My structural geology seminar has Monday, December 6th as a deadline to turn in their geologic map, cross sections, structural contour map, and research report – thus it is my…