structural geology
All of My Faults Are Stress Related
Category archives for structural geology
Slumgullion movement due to atmospheric pressure?
Posted by Kim Hannula on November 1, 2009 Go to Dave’s Landslide Blog for full details about this. I don’t have access to the paper. According to Dave Petley, there’s a new paper in Nature Geoscience about the Slumgullion landslide. Slumgullion is in my greater neighborhood – it’s in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, between Lake City (former home of Alferd Packer) and Creede…
GSA update: spatial thinking about hot springs near normal faults
Posted by Kim Hannula on October 20, 2009 I’m heading home tomorrow, and I’ve finally got a little time to blog. Here’s quick summary of the sessions I went to on Sunday (the first day of the meeting). Detachment Dynamics: heat, deformation, and fluids in extensional systems: Where continental crust stretches apart, steep normal faults join at depth into detachment systems: shear zones…
Linkfest: structural geology
Posted by Kim Hannula on September 2, 2009 I’ve spent 15 hours in the classroom teaching in the past three days, and several more meeting with students to sort out schedules and brainstorm ideas for senior thesis projects. My brain is fried, but I’m going to try to share some interesting stuff I’ve run into: – Early this afternoon, I posted a frantic…
Outcropedia: cool geology for Google Earth
Posted by Kim Hannula on July 28, 2009 Last month, another structural geologist came to town to check out possible sites for a future field class. While we were out looking at one of my favorite teaching sites, he commented that geologists seem unusually willing to share their secrets with one another. (We had met at one of the Cutting Edge workshops, where…
Looking at rocks up close… and not so close
Posted by Kim Hannula on July 6, 2009 One of the tricky things to convey about rocks, especially in a lecture or in a textbook, is the way geologists can see such different things at different scales – from thousands of kilometers to a few micrometers – and the way that all those observations fit together to understanding the processes that shape the…
Articles I want to read: May Geology edition
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 30, 2009 I made a promise to myself that every month, I would at least look through the abstracts on my RSS feeds and note interesting articles that I wanted to find time to read. So now it’s May 30, and I’d better do it before the June issues come out. So… articles in the May issue…
Repost from old blog: the sound of mylonites
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 7, 2009 I’m neck-deep in a five-week summer class, and spending my evenings reading for class prep and thinking about how to run discussions. So I’m on a blogging semi-hiatus, at least until I’ve got an hour or two free of other commitments. In the meantime, I’ll occasionally post some of my old favorites. This one was…
Hot rocks, thermal insulation, and the giant imaginary comforter in the lower crust
Posted by Kim Hannula on April 15, 2009 The cores of mountain belts formed by continental collisions often contain metamorphic rocks, formed when sediments were buried in the collision and transformed by heat and pressure. But the heat and pressure don’t happen simultaneously – rocks can be buried (and increase in pressure) much faster than they can heat up. When the rocks are…
Chocolate chip cookie tectonics, take two
Posted by Kim Hannula on April 13, 2009 My reviewers commenters on yesterday’s post on chocolate chip cookie deformation had some great points. (Some of them also seem to have been very hungry. For those who want me to experiment more, and to get to analyze the results: looks like I’ve got something that I can promise once the Donors Choose challenge rolls…
Structural analysis of a chocolate chip cookie
Posted by Kim Hannula on April 12, 2009 I probably shouldn’t have baked chocolate chip cookies yesterday, what with today being one of the two biggest chocolate-buzz holidays on the American calendar. But I did. I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out the best recipe adjustments for high elevation. My cookies have a tendency to puff up big, and then collapse into…