Tag: student research
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Game of Boxes
Last week, with a team of undergraduate research students we commenced a Game of Boxes in the wilds of central Virginia. The Game of Boxes is a difficult game, as in a normal year summer field work is a ‘For the Bold’ kind of endeavor. In 2020, with our COVID-19 safety protocols, the challenge was…
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Twenty for 2020
The starkness of the past two months has provided ample time to reflect on what makes the academic enterprise at William & Mary special and what’s been lost during this crisis. I’d like to finish the academic year with a photo essay that illustrates the spirit of our community and the wonder of research discoveries.…
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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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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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A Structural Geology Trifecta
Saturday found the 2017 W&M Geological Field Methods course in the field. This year’s class is composed of 16 junior and senior geology majors, and our field projects have taken us from the College Woods to the Fall Zone to the Blue Ridge Mountains. One of our Blue Ridge projects is focused on mapping the…
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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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Snow on Eclogite: W&M Geology in Norway
We’ve just finished our first William & Mary Geology 310 course to Norway. For 11 days, 16 students and two Geology faculty trekked around and over the Lofoten Islands. This post highlights the last half of our trip. On Friday, May 26th we took our longest road trip from our base in Henningsvær journeying west…
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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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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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Endings and Beginnings
William & Mary’s class of 2015 has graduated. On Sunday morning the Geology department held its graduation reception, and the mood was suitably festive as our latest cohort of seniors took possession of their diplomas. As I noted in earlier posts, part of what makes a bachelor of science degree in Geology from William &…
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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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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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Glimpses of the Past: The Rockfish Conglomerate
My family has a tradition of going camping about once per semester. Back in the spring of 2011, as the Appalachians were beginning to green up, we headed west to Rockfish, Virginia for a weekend camping trip to my Uncle Joe’s farm. Joe’s farm is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and…
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Living the Dream: Back to Alberene
Remember the Alberene Dream Team from the summer of 2011? This talented group of undergraduates poured themselves into research projects aimed at understanding the geology of the eastern Blue Ridge Mountains that summer and continued their work as part of their senior research during the academic year. Alex Johnson, the youngest member of the Alberene…