A pretty, garnet-rich heavy mineral lag on a New Hampshire beach.
Life has been busy, so once again I’ve been negligent with blogging. Let’s see if I can do better for the rest of the year.
To start, here’s a beautiful picture of a heavy mineral lag on a beach in New Hampshire. The red garnets show up particularly well. The heavier minerals, including garnets, have concentrated behind a log on a lakeside beach. Wave action has winnowed the lighter minerals away, leaving the heavier ones behind. I took this picture about a week ago when I was on holiday.
Enjoy this week’s picture! Does anyone else have pretty pictures of heavy mineral lags?
A stone wall incorporating a large glacial erratic boulder, Fox Forest, New Hampshire.
Continuing with my recent blogging themes of stone walls and glacial erratics, here is a picture of a stone wall in Fox Forest in New Hampshire. This stone wall was built out of glacial erratics and incorporates a large glacial erratic that was most likely left in situ… that is, left more or less where the glacier deposited it. Today, the stone wall is located in the middle of a relatively young forest. A hundred or so years ago, it was part of a farm. If you find yourself in southern New Hampshire, I recommend a hike in Fox Forest. It’s a lovely place, and you’ll see quite a few glacial erratics and stone walls!
I’m visiting family in New Hampshire at the moment… and also spending a little time with my favorite glacial erratic. I’ve posted about this particular glacial erratic before here and here. For this week’s Monday Geology Picture post I thought I’d share another shot of this stunning glacially deposited boulder. Enjoy!
I have been highly negligent in my blog writing recently. I hope to make up for that over the next few months… starting with writing my “Monday Geology Picture” posts regularly again.
For this week’s picture I’m sharing a picture that I took today in Deering, New Hampshire. The picture shows an old stone wall, now partly covered over by forest. Here in New England one often runs across old stone walls in the forest. These walls are generally remnants showing the outlines of former fields, most likely used long ago for sheep or other animals. Every now and then in the forest you run across other signs of former farming, such as apple trees and old stone foundations. Land use changes over the years, and here in New England much former farmland has returned to forest, albeit new growth forest full of young trees and other vegetation.
Here are a couple more pictures of the stone wall that I saw today:
Stone Wall 2, September 2015.Stone Wall 3, September 2015.
A glacial erratic in the woods near the Mervine Family Cabin in New Hampshire.
I spent the last two weeks of November visiting my family in New Hampshire. While I was in the US, I went on some long jogs and walks and took pictures of some glacial erratics, which can be found all around the Mervine Family Cabin in southern New Hampshire. This week’s “Monday Geology Picture” features a glacial erratic in the woods just down the road from the cabin. This large, angular rock was deposited during the retreat of the last ice age.
Setting off by kayak to explore the glacial erratics of Franklin Pierce Lake. Note the glacial erratic in the background.
Last week, I shared a picture of me sunbathing by my favorite glacial erratic, which is located near the Mervine Family Cabin on Franklin Pierce Lake in New Hampshire. This week, I thought I’d share a few more pictures of glacial erratics on Franklin Pierce Lake. Note the large sizes of these erratics and also how many of them are fairly angular. The erratics are mostly igneous and metamorphic rocks, and many of them contain large feldspar crystals.
I took all of the pictures in this post during a few kayaking trips during a recent visit to my family in New Hampshire. I really enjoy observing geology by kayak– I should do so more often!
My favorite glacial erratic, located on a little island near the Mervine Family Cabin.Some quite large erratic boulders!Angular erratic boulders. Note the front of my kayak for scale.Another view of an angular erratic boulder.A close-up view of the angular erratic boulder in the previous picture.Several erratic boulders.
I found this erratic boulder particularly interesting (note the large feldspar phenocrysts and interesting texture):
A particularly interesting erratic boulder. Check out those large feldspars!A closer view of the interesting erratic.
Sunbathing by my favorite glacial erratic. Franklin Pierce Lake, June 2013. Photograph by Jackie Gauntlett.
Happy Labor Day to all of my American readers! I hope that you all enjoy the holiday. Weather permitting, I plan on spending some time sunbathing by my favorite glacial erratic. I’m currently on vacation in New Hampshire and Cape Cod for about a week. I just finished up six weeks of field work in Alaska. My husband and I also visited New Hampshire for a couple of days on our way to Alaska back in July. After spending most of the past year in South Africa and six weeks in chilly northern Alaska, it’s nice to be home for a visit. And I’m always happy to visit my favorite glacial erratic!
The glacial erratic in front of my parents' lakeside cabin.
New England is full of glacial erratics: rocks which were transported and dropped by glaciers and which have a different lithology from the rocks upon which they have been deposited. Often, erratic rocks have an angular shape because they were broken off of bedrock by glaciers and have not yet had time to be weathered and rounded by water, wind, and other erosional forces. Glacial erratics can range in size from very small pebbles to very large boulders, but usually it is the boulders which are noticed since these stand out in the landscape and are not easily transported away.
I remember becoming interested in geology as a child when I began noticing large boulders in the middle of fields and the forest around my native New Hampshire. I asked my science teacher about these boulders, and he told me they were called glacial erratics and taught me a little about ice ages. Most of the erratic boulders seen throughout New England today were deposited during the last ice age, which reached a maximum around ~22,000 years ago and which ended ~10,000 years ago.
My favorite glacial erratic, which is shown in this week’s geology picture, sits on a small island in front of my parents’ lakeside cabin on Franklin Pierce Lake in New Hampshire. My parents purchased the cabin about 5 1/2 years ago, and although I had long moved away from home when they bought the cabin, I quickly fell in love with it (and its erratic island!) and try to visit regularly. Every year, my husband and I spend at least a couple of weeks at the cabin. Back in May, the cabin served as a geologist lair when my fellow geoblogger Dana Hunter visited for a few days. If you are brave, you can swim or kayak to the little island from my parents’ cabin and jump off the erratic.
An erratic jump! This picture gives you a better sense of the scale of this enormous erratic boulder.
Does anyone else have a favorite glacial erratic to share?
Rollins Chapel at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
Last week my husband and I visited my alma mater Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth has a beautiful campus, and one of my favorite buildings on the campus is Rollins Chapel. The chapel is a multi-faith spiritual center that is used by students and alumni for a variety of purposes. The chapel is used for spiritual services, quiet reflection, weddings, seminars, speeches, and other events. When I was a student at Dartmouth several years ago, the climbing club even used the outside of Rollins Chapel as a bouldering or “buildering” location.
I’m not religious, but I enjoyed and continue to enjoy visiting Rollins Chapel for quiet reflection and also to admire the chapel’s beautiful building stones. The chapel was built with large, rounded blocks of gray-white granite that are complemented by rusty red, more square blocks of sandstone. The chapel also contains some stunning stained glass windows.
Here are some more pictures from our visit to Rollins Chapel last week:
Close-up of the outside of the chapel #1.Close-up of the outside of the chapel #2.Inside of the chapel.A detail of the inside of the chapel. A closer look at some decorative trim inside the chapel.Another view inside the chapel.Carved sandstone inside the chapel.
I highly recommend a visit to Rollins Chapel if you’re ever on the Dartmouth College campus.
Note: I convinced my Geokittehs co-author Dana Hunter to fly from Seattle to New Hampshire to visit me for a few days. I handed in the final version of my PhD thesis on Friday May 4th, and Dana arrived the next day to help me celebrate. This is Part VI of my description of the fun georneys we had together during Dana’s visit. This is also the last post in my series about Dana’s visit. Dana and I will have to meet up again for more fun georneys!
When Dana came to visit, she told me that she had never been kayaking. I adore kayaking. From ages 12-22 I was very active in competitive whitewater slalom racing, in both kayaks and canoes. During grad school on flat Cape Cod, I didn’t do as much whitewater kayaking, but I’m hoping to return to the sport over the next few months. Since I handed in my PhD thesis a few weeks ago, I’ve been regularly going out on flatwater kayaking trips, which are excellent for building up those kayaking muscles. Anyway, when I learned that Dana had never been kayaking, I just had to take her on a kayaking trip! Fortunately, the lakeside geologist lair (aka my parents’ lakeside cabin) is well-stocked with 4 kayaks.
One of the kayaks at the lakeside geologist lair is a nice tandem flatwater kayak that is excellent for pairing a novice kayaker with a more experienced kayaker. We call the tandem kayak “The Family Wagon Truckster” because it is large and slow and can fit 2-3 people. For our kayak adventure, we took the Family Wagon Truckster and put Dingo, my parents’ dog, in the middle of the big kayak. Dingo is seven now, and he loves kayaking. When Dingo was a puppy, he was terrified of the water, but I spent several weeks training him to go kayaking. Now, Dingo is happy as can be in a kayak. He’ll even bring you his life vest when he wants to go kayaking.
We didn’t see too much geology during out kayak trip, but we did take a look at several large boulders, which are most likely glacial erratics.
Here’s some pictures from Dana’s first kayaking trip:
The view from the front of the kayak.Lakeside scenery.Dingo and I. Also something in front of the lens.Dingo and Dana.Dana, looking reflective.Paddling away...
Georneys 