Tag: research
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Jamestown and Geodiscovery
Jamestown Island is a low patch of ground in southeastern Virginia that’s witnessed its share of American history. Settler colonists arrived from England in 1607 and sited their fort/town on the island ~40 miles (65 km) upstream from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a foundational location in the American origin narrative – for…
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Gladiators Rule! The 2020 Spring W&M Geology Departmental Field Trip
The Geology department rolled out of Williamsburg last weekend and headed straight to Virginia’s geographic centroid for a wide-ranging field trip. It was the spring semester version of the Geology departmental field trip that’s open to all and free to attend. As always, we were rolling deep with more than 45 of us spread across…
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A Frenzy of Fall Field Trips 1: The Rockfish River Watershed
Note: this is the first installment in what will be a frenzy of posts about recent fall field trips in the William & Mary Geology department. This semester, one of the courses I’m teaching is Geology 311- Field Methods in the Earth Sciences. As the name implies we venture to the field to collect our…
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On the Road Again
Last week much of the William & Mary Geology department hit the road again en route to the Geological Society of America’s Southeastern Section meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s an annual spring ritual for W&M Geology students as this meeting is well-timed and can be the perfect venue in which to present research to…
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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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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…