Tag: Piedmont

  • Summer Research: Going with the Flow

    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…

  • A Field Day

    A Field Day

    It is a rare weekday when I can slip away from the College. Yesterday with my colleague Brent Owens and research fellow John Hollis we played hooky and went to the field. Three weeks from now Brent and I will be leading a field trip for the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting: Traversing suspect…

  • Searching for Hylas

    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…

  • Whose Fault is It? The 2011 Virginia Earthquake (Part 2)

    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…

  • All Shook Up! The 2011 Virginia Earthquake

    All Shook Up! The 2011 Virginia Earthquake

    As the year comes to a close it is a fine time to reflect on the 2011 Virginia earthquake. It’s been four months since the Virginia earthquake jolted eastern North America, and we now know more about what happened. This moderate-size (Mw=5.8) quake–felt by millions of people from Alabama to Quebec–caused significant damage in Louisa…