Tag: faults
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Summer Solstice in the Field: A River on Rock
Summer is not a quiet time in the William & Mary Geology department. Pop onto the 2nd floor of McGlothlin-Street Hall this summer and you’ll find a bevy of undergraduates pursuing research on an array of topics including paleoclimatology, geochemistry, petrology, hydrology, paleontology, coastal geology, and structural geology. After a few weeks of indoor work,…
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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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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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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…