As much as I love trilobites, here is a photograph I took of pretty Missippian-age crinoids on display at the Smithsonian Museum.
Ok, ok, Matt has a trilobite head for you who insist. Happy Fossil Day! Hug your favorite dead-and-preserved-in-the-rock-record critter today! Don’t forget to donate to science classrooms in honor of Earth Science week, either!
Three of the six winners of the Ashley Morris award for excellence in New Orleans blogging to date. These are phenomenal people.
Stumbled upon a street called Ruelle des Ursulines and you know I had to check it out. I ended up walking through the grounds of the School of the Ursulines, one of the oldest schools in North America and a UNESCO world heritage site.
More pictures from the Quebec trip in this slideshow.
Map of French Québec City's fortifications on bedrock relief (North is conveniently to the bottom right)
Québec City sits between the Laurentian highlands of the southeastern Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachian Mountains that were formed during the Taconic and Acadian orogenies. Bedrock here is the Upper Ordovician Utica shale that “overlies the predominantly shallow marine carbonate facies of the Cambrian-Ordovician St. Lawrence Platform” (or St. Lawrence lowlands).The adjacent St. Lawrence River, which I gather formed post-Pleistocene glaciation by cutting into the relatively less-resistant sedimentary rocks sandwiched between the Laurentians and the Appalachians, is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway system.
As a sign by one of the many higher-up river outlooks explains, the land beneath Quebec City was not chosen by the French because of the overwhelming tectonics over an equally stupefying period of time that created it but purely for defense strategic reasons. To each their own time scale.
In a time-traveling nutshell: Canadian Shield forms the core of the North American continent –> happy passive margin forms with the buildup of a carbonate platform and the transgression of the sea –> BAM BAM Taconic and Acadian continental collision events creating the Appalachian mountains –> some quiet time as the Atlantic Ocean forms to the east –> glaciation from the north –> glacial retreat –> uplifted Québec City and associated river –> some French dude named Samuel de Champlain surveys the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence area, claims the high cape of Québec City and territory all the way from north of Minnesota down to and including Louisiana for New France in 1608 and his people put up a bunch of ramparts against, well, everyone –> the Brits take over in 1763 –> Canada forms in 1868 and tells everyone to sod off in exchange for putting limey monarchs on its currency –> Canadian geologists find economic natural gas in the Utica shale. (Someone call They Might Be Giants and set this to music.)
Related reading:
This is probably the best picture I took on the tectonics field trip to Utah last week, and it was with my brand spanking new iPhone. Now powered by Verizon, thank you.
Created by fracture-controlled weathering of sandstone, just like the rest of the rock formations and arches of Arches National Park, this group looked to me like three robed courtiers whispering, sharing, plotting the day’s latest. Humans are always scanning for familiar patterns, while the geologist also sees weathered aeolian sandstone of Jurassic age.
An internet search turned up that this outcrop is called The Three Gossips. We humans don’t look at things very differently at all.
The Sacred Pow and her Runner at Krewe du Vieux 2011 © Michael Homan
Here I sit in a friend’s living room in New Orleans with a few moments to myself. A rare luxury these days.
When things happen in my life, they tend to happen all at once.
1) The Packers won the Superbowl! It all happened so fast – we went from possibly wild card to laying the smack down on the Giants to beating the Bears to making it into the playoffs to beating the Eagles and the Falcons (?!). And then another epic meetup with the Bears in Chicago where we all know JAY what CUTLER happened. And just like that we were in the Superbowl and won it. Tada! Utter disbelief.
None of this has been given any time to sink in because of
2) Some big news I will drop next week. No, I am not pregnant, dear aunties of the world whose ears perk up each time I place the words “big” and “news” in the same sentence.
3) First the Superbowl and now massive labor protests. On, Wisconsin!
Pro-Labor protests in Madison (CC Image courtesy of Lost Albatross on Flickr)
The Cheesehead Intifada, The Velveeta Revolution, The Asiago Agenda is going down in Madison and all over Wisconsin. Cheesy jokes aside, this quick post can do no justice to the gigantic worker protest in my state and its implications for public- and private-sector employees’ right to collective bargaining nationwide. What is at stake here is fair, living wages and benefits for state employees as well as their right to organize together for better contracts. It’s also about our long-term quality of life and services as a nation, which are at risk thanks to short-sighted, stop-gap measures that are politically-motivated and do not even begin to really trim the fat. For as the saying goes, “Pay teachers, cops, etc. as if they’re amateurs and incompetents and amateurs and incompetents are the only ones who will take the job.” Yes, everyone must make sacrifices in this economy, but why are the targets inevitably the people who can least afford it and not the people who broke our economy in the first place? What about Wall Street and parties who got significant tax breaks paying us back?
Thanks to First Draft (hugs and smooches to Scout, who spent days in the Capitol and rocks so hard!) and gl33p for working hard to keep us informed this past week. Check out photos from my friends Plankers and Jon Miner (when he gets around to posting them). And you go on with your bad self, Charles Woodson!
4) And the whole reason we’re in New Orleans: Krewe du Vieux 2011. The 25th anniversary of the krewe and parade. And, boy, were we 25 years Wasted. The Krewe de C.R.A.P.S. theme this year was 25 Years Of Running From Bullshit and we channeled the spirit of the Pamplona encierro as well as San Fermin en Nueva Orleans to honor a quarter century of running from the crap heaped on New Orleans by politicians at all levels.
That’s all I’ve got. The pictures will do the talking. Please do me a huge favor and put links to your KdV photos in the Comments’ section.
Happy Mardi Gras, y’all!
February 6, 2011, 22:10 EST – @maitri: “We won the Superbowl, Packer nation! The Lombardi trophy goes home! Titletown! Aaaaahhhhahahahaha! LOVE LOVE LOVE!”
Packers quarterback & Superbowl MVP Aaron Rodgers with the Lombardi Trophy (thanks for the picture, Blair!)
That is all. I am going to be in bed for the rest of the week watching the highlights reel over and over again.
… worrying about whether I’m gonna die from an eruption at Yellowstone is so far down my list of concerns that I am more worried about being gnawed to death by a pack of angry prairie dogs. It could happen, but it is highly unlikely … for the record, “supervolcano” isn’t a geological term.
From the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum collection