Photosynth + Geology

I'm currently updating an older post that includes geology panoramas but I just love this photo so much I had to post it again - actually this is a second post about GRBA as I've posted a static image before. This is a fantastic view of Wheeler Peak and the relict rock glacier nestled in Lehman Cirque.

Gigapan #5: St Catherine Formation, Vermont

Driving along Route 4 from Whitehall, NY into Rutland, VT you pass a lot of exposed road cuts and this is one of my favorite. There is another that exposes some really nice isoclinal folding but it isn't really suitable for a Gigapan. Most of the exposures are the Cambrian St Catherine Formation - see the Gigapan for a more detailed description.

Geology Panoramas

Ok, so these aren't Gigapan photos, but I realized I'd taken a lot of panoramas and never finished stitching them together. I used Microsfot ICE to stitch them and will continue to update the descriptions when I find the right field notebooks!

UPDATE (6/29/2010):
I'm going to begin adding these panoramas as Photosynths; it means I have to re-stitch all the originals again so I will update gradually:

Erdpyramiden = very cool geology

I realized I started this post but never got beyond creating a title and saving a draft - so this has been waited two years for completion! During my three month visit to the Südtirol of northern Italy, I visited the Erdpyramiden of Ritten (Renon) located approximately 3500 feet to the north of Longomoso in the map below; you can see evidence of erosion on the east side of highway SP73. There are a number of locations for these pyramids, including one directly to the west of Brunnenburg Castle where we were living. These particular pyramids form in dense glacial till when small rills expand into gullies and isolate fins from one another. These fins are often protected by boulders in the till so the surrounding till preferentially erodes away, leaving the pyramids. Click on the slide show below for more information.

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Gigapan #4: Quarry Stick, Poultney, Vermont

This was a difficult shot to take since the only vantage point is a north-facing view, towards the sun and lots of white clouds, which interfered with the stitching of the guy wires. The purpose and technical names for the various components are included with the Gigapan, just click to explore. These sticks used to be commonplace, but this is the last one standing in the Slate Valley region of New York and Vermont. The postcard at the end of this post is a view of the Eureka and Johnson Quarries when mining was in full swing - pretty astounding really.

Gigapan #3: Eureka Quarry, Poultney, Vermont

It took a few tries but this is my third Gigapan photo of a slate quarry in Poultney, Vermont visible on the map below:

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The Gigapan was taken from the soutwest looking northeast across the quarry. This area is dotted with slag piles and drowned quarry pits but this particular area represents the earliest slate mining in the town and continues to be productive in today's competitive market. This particular quarry also contains the only remaining quarry stick still standing - a feature for a future Gigapan.

From One Slate Valley To Another

There aren't any wineries in the Slate Valley of Vermont but a friend of mine passed along a bottle of Clean Slate, a Riesling from Mosel, Germany. I found the artwork simple and clever - the Mosel River meandering through blue-green slate. However, I followed the path of the Mosel and the artwork doesn't match up with any actual meanders, kind of a disappointment. I did a little digging to see if I could determine the origin of the "steep slate hills" and I think the slate in question is part of the Hunsrück Slate formation; I found references to a Mosel and Moselle Slate but I think they were common names not formations. Apparently the Hunsrück preserves a pretty spectacular fossil record and is an important Konservat-Lagerstätten.

I wasn't able to find a great geologic map or any articles describing other slate formations - clearly my weak German is at fault here - help out if you know of other resources! I did find the following map, which should help contextualize the location and geology a little bit:


So it appears lithology is where the similarities end between the Slate Valley of Vermont and Mosel Valley of Germany - they are different ages (Cambrian versus Devonian), one preserves fossils another preserves nothing, and the steep valley walls of the Mosel offer stark contrast to the rolling hills of Vermont. However, the wine was pretty decent!

Summer Fieldwork Photos

I just wanted to post a few photos from my summer fieldwork thus far in Dover, VT. The surficial geology isn't incredibly surprising but the landscape is beautiful and there are some nice examples of thin glacial till, kame deposits, and a well-preserved striated knob in the northeast corner of the town.

Gigapan #1 and #2: West Castleton Syncline

Well I finally purchased an Epic 100 and figured out all the minutia of the GigaPan + camera settings and took my first two pictures. They are of the same location could have a little more detail in places but I took them at a slight angle and the sun wasn't cooperating. This is a repeat of an image Ron Schott has already taken, but since I live so close to the outcrop I'll likely keep going back until I get a really nice one! I'll update this post as I take new ones and keep a running 'tally.' I have a long list of local and regional outcrops I want to GigaPan and will hopefully take a few more this weekend and into next week.

Bookcrop #2: Geology of Thacher Park

Cover Page

I feel as though I've been dipping into the Helderberg geology well fairly frequently but given the state of affairs in New York State right now I couldn't help but highlight one of my favorite little books in this latest bookcrop entry. A "Guide to the Geology of John Boyd Thacher Park (Indian Ladder Region) and Vicinity" was written by Winifred Goldring and published in 1933. Winifred is herself is worthy of an entire entry but at the moment I will do her an injustice and point you to a great summary by Aldrich et al. 2005. As I've stated before, I grew up on Thompson's Lake a few miles from Thacher Park but I didn't discover this gem of a guide until I was in graduate school. I described the Helderberg section in my sedimentology and stratigraphy course but failed to find this as a reference until much later.

To see Goldring's map of the area, click on the above image. The red square is roughly where my parent's house is located and the steep escarpment to the east is the Helderberg escarpment. You can see the primary lithologies surrounding Thompson's Lake are the New Scotland Beds and the Esopus Shale, however the house my father built incorporated a lot of Manlius Limestone riddled with brachiopods, ostracods, and tentaculites - promoting my early interest in geology.

Goldring provides numerous plates depicting classic Helderberg geology, typical fossils and locations to key outcrops; some of which I still have to visit! If you're planning a trip to the park, I recommend this book to help guide the way and make sure you don't miss out on the horn corals, Phacops, tentaculties, or Favosites helderbergiae!

Geology, the iPad and Education

I've been trying to gather myself together after the semester to write up these thoughts - I pre-ordered a 3G iPad and it arrived at the time of the year when chaos reigns and time for thoughtful posts is unthinkable. Since then I've been exploring the various obvious applications and a few not so obvious that I think are useful in the context of education. I want to make it very clear that: (1) this is not an exhaustive list of available apps and (2) I don't believe the iPad is going to be very useful as a field unit - one mishap and you will have this experience on your hands (skip to 3:18 if you want to avoid the annoying part). However, in the face of cloud computing and emerging apps I do believe it could serve a very useful pedagogical tool, oh and a nerdy expensive calculator.

Obvious Applications:

I'm not big on buying expensive apps so I'm only going to include the free and relatively inexpensive ones I've installed.

1. First up is the Dinosaur Handbook; what self respecting geologist won't want this on their iPad?! This app houses 1400+ dinosaur images complete with descriptions and background. Even if you don't like dinosaurs (what?!), this will likely calm any 7 year old and keep them busy for HOURS. This version is designed for the iPhone so the resolution is a little low on some of the images and you can only view the text and information in portrait mode. It took me a few minutes to figure that out!

2. There are lots of applications that provide earthquake updates and most cost lest than a dollar. However I've been quite happy using a combination of iQuakeLite, iHurricane and MKA Alerts. The first is solely for earthquakes, the second tracks and maps hurricanes and the latter covers a variety of natural disasters; all three are free and provide decent visuals with sufficient summaries to go explore an event if it seems worth your while. MKA alerts and iHurricane were designed for the iPhone so they too suffers from a reduced resolution when you zoom in on the map.

3. What geo-iPad would be complete without a geologic time scale! The GeoTimeScale app is a simplistic interface that provides a basic timescale with dates (although heed a previous reviewers caution about the dates not matching the official GSA timescale dates) and simple historical geology. This app could be an amazing resource for teachers but it needs to be updated to provide both US and UK chronologies and more extensive documentation/images about the "Age of Reptiles" or the "Permian Extinction." This is a free application so I'm not too surprised at the bare-bones nature but it "could" be so much more. This developer also created a Pangaea app that provides a decent visual illustrating the breakup of Pangaea but it is also relatively simplistic and lacking the background information that could really make this app worth purchasing. It is also one of the larger applications approaching 70MB - I uninstalled it after exploring it for just a few minutes. Another related visual is the Iapetus app, which provides a simple interface for exploring continent configuration since the late Precambrian. It is simple but does a nice job of illustrating historical tectonics and if you pay attention you can even 'catch' the Wilson Cycle.

4. What better way to spend the day than reviewing how many NEOs have skimmed by Earth? Asteroid Alert is an app that allows you just this luxury - it will make you the star of the next doomsday or Libertarian self-reliance party you attend. I have to admit this little app provides startling information you can quickly share with students; in the last two days 3 asteroids with an average size of 150m have missed Earth by an average of 15km. I will likely use this in my Natural Disasters class to try and illustrate just how much shrapnel barely misses us each year!

5. If you have a 3G version or will be using an iPad where you always get wireless you could also make use of PocketMinDat, which isn't really an app, just a website formatted to fit into an iPhone interface. So when you view it on the iPad it is a little small but functional. It provides a great database that appears to be frequently updated and nice photos (again, reduced resolution on the iPad).

6. My favorite application int his list is iSeismometer - I guarantee you will play with this for awhile. Beyond being fun, this will be an excellent way to illustrate the behavior of seismic waves through different materials. It's an inexpensive alternative to a real seismometer but it sill illustrates the same principles. See it in action below:

Less Obvious Applications?:

Most of the above applications are fun and moderately useful as educational tools. I found two applications that I think could serve a more educational purpose and two that fall more in the mapping arena.

7. I downloaded the ClinometerHD app because I thought it would be 'neat' to see how well it compared with traditional level tools - calibration is a true sign of anal-retentive nerdiness. And while it was likely designed to help level furniture or pictures, it occurred to me that this could be a really nice visual to depict how we measure dip. There are two was to measure an angle using this app - using a bubble interface and an inclinometer level (see screenshots). Either of these two could be used at an outcrop or in class to better visually demonstrate dip using both interfaces to help reinforce the concept. What about strike you ask?

8. The same developer also created CompassHD + Magnetometer, which provides numerous visuals related to magnetism - in this case Earth's magnetism. Not only does this provide a nice compass visual (which is sketchy at times) but it also provides information on the strength of magnetic fields and a really nice visual of declination for discussion related to paleomagnetism. Combining the clinometer and compass apps seems like a really nice way to help students visualize these concepts. I won't get to practice for a year, sabbatical awaits so hopefully someone else gives it a try!

9. In addition to geologizing I also spend a lot of time 'doing' GIS. In fact I think I do more GIS-related work and research than geology lately. As I mentioned, I won't ever use the iPad for a field-computer but on the rare occasion I have to GPS something and I find myself without a the Trimble, I think that both the TerraPad and Motion X GPS HD applications will serve the purpose. I prefer TerraPad as it is free and you can export as KML, however GPS HD has a really nice interface and lots of map layers to download. However, if I really want to 'do' GIS on the iPad I will likely use my GISCloud account and not purchase iGIS (very pricey). I can't speak to the latter's features but my GISCloud account is free for the time being and works nicely on a 3G connection, it's a little slow on an Edge connection.

A couple of closing thoughts: although the iPad doesn't have a camera for downloading field photos at the end of the day, I'm guessing there will be an update to the EyeFie Manager software so that you can wirelessly download your photos from a camera using the EyeFi pro card (which works flawlessly so far on my laptop). There's an app to upload photos from an iPhone but that has a built in camera, so we just have to wait awhile.

I've also dabbled with trying to sketch using a few apps like Penultimate and Paperdesk, which thoroughly convinced me to keep sketching in my notebook - at least until I find a decent stylus. I hope some of these thoughts are helpful in narrowing down the search for both fun and educational apps. If I missed something obvious, please let me know!