Tag: Piedmont
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Traipsing across the Piedmont: A Day Trip thru Geology and History
The W&M Geology Departmental Spring field trip left the Atlantic Coastal Plain last Sunday morning for a quick dash westward into the Piedmont: a day trip with equal measures of geology and history in the mix. As is our tradition, W&M undergraduates conducting research in a particular area lead the trip which is open to…
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A Highland Fling (Part 2): Learning from LiDAR
The Field Methods class finished our late Winter/early Spring fieldwork at William & Mary’s Highland in March. Over the course of four field excursions, we put in ~530 people hours at Highland – learning to do science in the field and ultimately collecting data on vegetation, soils, water, and rocks (of course). Since Spring Break,…
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A Highland Fling (Part 1)
The new semester at William & Mary is well underway and after this weekend, we’re off and running with the Field Methods in the Earth & Environmental Sciences course. In contrast to previous years, this edition of Field Methods is focused on only one location – William & Mary’s Highland, once the home and estate…
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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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Geological Field Tripping in Cyberspace
Early April is the time when my Earth Structure & Dynamics class ventures to the Appalachians for a weekend of learning and intellectual companionship. I’ve reported on these academic adventures in this blog many times1. Over the course of two days we roll across Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge and out…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 3: Going to the South Side
Moby, the American musician with a wide-ranging and stylishly downtempo sound, released an exceptional album entitled Play in 1999. My favorite song is South Side, here’s a short snippet of the lyrics … we ride all day looking out for a sunny day here we are now going to the South Side Two decades later,…
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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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Over Nottoway Falls
Another glorious February weekend, and I was off, once again, to the field with my research students. On this trip we returned to the Falls of the Nottoway River to obtain more measurements and complete our mapping of this awesome exposure in the middle the Southside Virginia Piedmont. We brought a small friend with us,…
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On the Rocks – A Day at Nottoway Falls
In August, I described a set of cascades that form a major knickpoint on the Nottoway River in the Southside Virginia Piedmont. Last Saturday, my Structural Geology Seminar spent a day on the rocks studying the geology of this expansive outcrop. The outcrop we focused on is the uppermost cascade which exposes ~2,000 m2 of…
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Knickpoint on the Nottoway
Deep in the heart of Southside Virginia lies a bedrock outcrop of tremendous size. Quality outcrops are rare in the Piedmont, but between the communities of Victoria and Crewe the Nottoway River tumbles over sloping bedrock ledges making a dramatic knickpoint that exposes acres of granitic gneiss in the channel. The Nottoway River is a…
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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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Paddle Trip Report 2 – Across the Piedmont and Fall Zone
At the end of my last post we’d completed the first two days of an 8-day canoe trip from the Blue Ridge Foothills in central Virginia to Williamsburg, and were tucked in on a gravelly island in the middle of the Rivanna River. DAY 3- Rivanna Rain The rain returned during the night. Day 3…
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Mystery at Midway Mills
Virginia’s Piedmont is an expansive area of gently rolling terrain whose underlying geology is quite complex. The old metamorphic and igneous rocks of the Piedmont are cut and overlain by a series of basins into which sediment (now sedimentary rocks) accumulated during the Triassic and Jurassic periods (225 to 200 million years ago). These rift…
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Field Methods 2014: Wrapping It Up
The last day of classes at William & Mary is traditionally a celebratory affair, and on the last day of class this fall we wrapped up the Field Methods course with a rowdy poster session where the results from our three field projects were presented. As I noted earlier this semester, Geology 311- Field Methods…
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The Department that Floats Together…
The latest addition of the Geology departmental field trip rolled out of Williamsburg last Friday and then floated down the James River on Saturday. The weather in the Mid-Atlantic region was iffy. A stalled frontal system bolstered an on-shore flow of moist air, but a spot of rain here and there did not deter the…
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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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50 Hours in the Field: the Earth Structure & Dynamics Field Trip 2014
The 2014 Earth Structure & Dynamics class field trip left Williamsburg at 1 p.m. last Friday bound for the Blue Ridge Mountains and points beyond. We would not return to campus until 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, some 50 hours after our departure. The field trip is a spring tradition that’s been enjoyed by students…