It’s Tye River Tuesday, and in today’s post we’re going into and all the way to the bottom of the Tye River. Nearly a year ago, on September 27th 2024, the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which a day earlier…
LATITUDE ZERO – Musings on the Equator
The September Equinox is here. It is one of the two dates every year in which the Sun ‘passes’ directly over the Equator, the divider of hemispheres – Latitude Zero˚. Ecuador rightly celebrates its position on the Equator and at…
THE FOUNDATION OF JAMES MONROE’S HIGHLAND
James Monroe was America’s 5th president and at the beginning of the 19th century he called Highland, an antebellum plantation in Virginia’s Blue Ridge foothills, home. In 1825, saddled by personal debt, Monroe sold the Highland estate and over the…
MOJAVE DESERT RAIN SHADOW
Here’s a weather video from the Mojave Desert in California, we’d taken a fine hike in Joshua Tree National Park and found ourselves on the summit of Warren Peak. At the summit there was a righteous wind blowing in from…
MASSIES MILL AND THE HURRICANE CAMILLE FLOOD
Tonight, 56 years ago, on August 19th to 20th 1969, the remnants of Hurricane Camille deluged Nelson County, Virginia and in the process supercharged the Tye River with high flows and flooding that had never before witnessed. Across the Blue…
CHASING THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY
For fans of Deep Time there are few things as exciting as an unconformity. An unconformity is a geologic contact separating rock masses of two different ages. Something in the rock record has gone missing or perhaps it was never…
GLACIAL LAKE MISSOULA: a weather video from the Pleistocene?
Missoula, Montana is a college town built on the flat ground flanking the Clark Fork River as it emerges from the Garnet Range and John Long Mountains. In March 2024, I was in Missoula visiting Mountain Press Publishing and its…
TYE RIVER TUESDAY
This post commences a series about Virginia’s Tye River, let’s call it Tye River Tuesday. It won’t happen every Tuesday, but my aim is to write about the Tye River every third or fourth week. Where is the Tye River? It’s in central…
OVERHEAD & UNDERFOOT
This post is an introduction to my new blog- Chuck’s Wonder World. I’m a geology professor at William & Mary; my teaching and field research take me to places from southeastern Virginia to Oman. There’s plenty of geological wonder in…