Tag: geology research
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Aground on the Hampton Bar with the Sea Making a Fair Breach
200 years ago this month, in early April 1823, a ship foundered and sunk onto a shallow sand bar in Hampton Roads, Virginia. On April 5th its loss was reported in the Baltimore Patriot & Mercantile Advertizer which noted that a schooner “laden with stone” went aground on the Hampton Bar “with the sea making…
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When the Research Road Turns Rough
COVID-19 has shuttered the academic world. At William & Mary, teaching goes on as technology enables us to connect in new ways with our students. But online learning is a poor substitute for what happens in the classroom, lab and field. We’ll manage, and my faculty colleagues are focused making things right for students during…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 2: Flowing Low and Flying High
Earlier this summer I reported on the Gladstone Gladiators’ ‘games’ on and over the James River, all part of our research campaign to decipher and map the geology in the central Virginia Piedmont. On that trip, we used a drone to acquire aerial imagery of rock structures exposed in the river bottom while we paddled…
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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…
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The Gladstone Gladiators
The summer research season has arrived at William & Mary. This year, I’m starting a new project in central Virginia with a team of undergraduate students. It is truly at the center of Virginia, as our study region includes the geographic center (more precisely, the centroid) of Virginia at 37.5215° N, 78.8537° W. We’re not…
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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…
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Stand and Deliver: W&M Geology leads the Virginia Geological Field Conference
I spent the front end of Fall Break herding more than 100 geologists across the Blue Ridge at the 47th Virginia Geological Field Conference. It is an annual meeting of academics, professionals, students, and rockhounds that gather to learn about new geological research in the Commonwealth. It was a special trip for me as two…
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A Decade’s Worth of Field Britches
It’s mid-summer, and it is time for geological fieldwork with my undergraduate research students. As I’ve written before, geologists commonly go to the field to collect their primary data, and for William & Mary geologists, summer is a prime time to gather field data for Senior Research projects. The prudent geologist wears pants in the…
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The High and the Low
The past month has been a blur as I’ve been away from campus most weekends doing geology with William & Mary students. I’m way behind getting these adventures posted, and this is the first in a series of posts intended to help me climb out of this virtual hole in the blogosphere. It’s been nearly…
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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,…