Tag: Civil War
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After the Surge: A Day on the North Anna River
The river was still falling at midnight, yet I went to bed confident that the North Anna River would be on the rise by morning. At 7 a.m., the U.S. Geological Survey gage at Hart’s Corner dutifully showed that the North Anna had risen by nearly 50 cm (20”) during the past six hours. The…
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The Saddest Affair: A Geologic Perspective on the Battle of the Crater, U.S. Civil War
One hundred and fifty years ago this week a terrible and pernicious battle was fought at Petersburg, Virginia during the American Civil War. In the summer of 1864 the Confederate and Union armies were at a stalemate; dug in and facing each other across a long front. Lt. Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer from…
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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…