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This is a famous location for finding fossils on the Dorset coast. Some really big and important finds were made in the late 1800s. The sea is constantly washing more of the cliff down onto the beach providing new opportunities for that once-in-a-lifetime find.
I had hoped to get the focus good enough for geologists to look at individual rocks in the cliff, but as you can see, I didn't quite nail it. The next bay to the East (right) at Seatown is here: http://tinyurl.com/m3f8ap. |
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Seatown, Dorset at 9:30am.
I went to Seatown with my friend Igor many years ago. We camped in a field right next to the beach and a pub that did good food, and I remembered it as very pleasant spot. So when my friend - fossil-head cmlbath - told me that it was one of the best places in the country for fossils, I suggested we go there and we did. There is a companion shot taken from the beach here: http://tinyurl.com/qslfgy. As you can see, the camp site has grown somewhat! It even has its own sewerage treatment plant. However, this unsavoury fact aside, I enjoyed my stay there. This surprised me because the camp site is big and quite noisy in the evenings with children running around screaming etc. Then I discovered that I rather liked being there because it reminded me of my childhood and how exciting it was to camp and in a place like this in particular. I nearly channelled the spirit of my childhood self and started running around screaming myself. I like this shot very much. My normal reaction when seeing a wonderful coastal view with a camp site like this is to bemoan the visual blight of coastal camp sites. But it struck me that there are all sorts of tiny everyday details in this shot and it is to be much preferred over boring landscape panoramas (imo of course). Also, I have taken a number of gigapans where in principle one could see cmlbath looking for fossils but for one reason or another he is not actually in the shot. But at last I have captured the man in action. 10 points for the first person to snapshot him. (2 points for spotting his car.) If you are a relatively new cmlbath-spotter, you may find this image useful: http://tinyurl.com/ltsu7o. |
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A GigaPan of the bookshelf in my office intended to highlight a bunch of my "deskcrops" (geologic specimens I have a fond attachment to) for The Accretionary Wedge #4 (http://www.goodschist.com/2007/12/02/the-accretionary-wedge-4-call-for-submissions/). Unfortunately I didn't have any good way to light the office for photography and thus the images are pretty grainy when you zoom in much. I also didn't use the full zoom capability of the camera in order to keep the stitch a reasonable size. | |||
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Office Bookshelf and Deskcrops contains 1 matching snapshot(s):
Snapshot: The Big Chart: My Intro Geology students know this well.
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Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems
see http://www.carnegiemnh.org/exhibitions/hillman.htm for info on this hall of the museum |
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Distant cliffs of Fort Hays Limestone. Use red/blue glasses to view the anaglyph 3D effect. Created from two 12x3 Gigapan images shot about 1 foot apart. Alignment, cropping, and anaglyph shading done in Photoshop. |
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The view from the WWII gun emplacement/observation bunker/thingy overlooking the harbour. For a closer view of the harbour including the Gay Archer, see http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=22503. |
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As the Laurentide glacier retreated from the Champlain Valley 13,600 years ago, the ice damned the valley and Glacial Lake Vermont rose to about 170 m (550 feet) above sea level, which is the elevation of the camera. This sand and gravel was carried by an ice-marginal river that built kame terraces until it reached the lake where it dumped fine sediments into the standing water forming a delta more than 4 km long.
This quarry is the source of material that is spread on snow-covered roads in Salisbury. It is being sorted and stockpiled this month. Notes: I used a Nikon D40 with Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI-s lens, f/8, 1/160 second, ISO 200, NEF. 35mm equiv is 450mm. Field of view set to 3 degrees. |
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A ~100 Ma intrusive igneous rock that is characteristic of Cretaceous granitoids of the Sierra Nevada Batholith.
How many minerals can you identify? |
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One for the geology people. This beach is supposed to be good for fossils but we didn't find any. Incidentally, there is real geological interest in the area - see the gigapans of Ian Stimpson (http://www.gigapan.org/viewProfile.php?userid=4217).
You can see another nearby beach here http://tinyurl.com/mowcrw move on to Milford Haven here http://tinyurl.com/nsx7sn, or see all my Pembroke gigapans here http://tinyurl.com/lp9gqk. |
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This is a thin section of dunite, a rock made up almost entirely of the mineral olivine, as seen in cross-polarized light through a Leica Z6 APO Macroscope. There is a band of black mineral grains to the left of center of the image that is a cumulate layer of the mineral chromite - in the magma chamber from which these minerals crystallized that band of chromite would have originally settled out in a horizontal layer. The width of the entire field of view visible here is just under 2 cm.
Unlike most of my GigaPans I didn't have help from the robot on this one. The thin section was moved by hand and the images were shot one by one. In fact, the stitch took far less time than the capture. Nonetheless it was well worth the effort - and the kind of task that is ideally suited to undergraduate/graduate students! :-) |