There was an article about local geology published last Wednesday in a series of local newspapers, the Connection newspapers. The reporter came out to campus at some point and interviewed me, as well as John, one of the retired gentlemen who are taking geology classes at NOVA for fun. (She also interviewed by e-mail David, another retired fellow with a penchant for learning geology.)

UPDATED: Here's a link to the article.

However, I'm ticked off. I knew that I was relating a complicated geologic story to the reporter, and because she had little geologic training, I encouraged her to send it to me for fact-checking before it was published. However, this never happened. As a result, the published story has major errors in its geologic details, and that bums me out because (a) misinformation gets spread around and (b) it makes me look like an absolute idiot.

In many ways, what I said to the reporter was just totally @#$%&*ing mangled, and I cringe to think that my colleagues might read this crap and think that's what I actually think (and teach!). UPDATE: the editor took down the digital version of the article, accepted many of my corrections, and it will be this corrected version which is published in the print edition. I'd like to publically thank the editor, Mike O'Connell, for being so responsive to my complaints.

For the record, here are the edits I would have offered:

Local History Etched in Stone
NOVA professor and class explore geologic history of Fairfax County

By Amber Healy
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Driving through Centreville, Lee Highway takes a noticeable dip, sloping down toward Manassas and stretching the almost 60 miles out to Luray. But what many Fairfax County residents may not know is that the dip is evidence of a geological event, the creation of the Culpeper bBasin between the Blue Ridge and Piedmont rock formation ages physiographic provinces.

Callan Bentley, a full-time geology instructor at the Annandale campus of Northern Virginia Community College, said the area near Clifton is settled on the border of the two eras areas, a cross-section of geological history that may go unnoticed to the untrained eye.

"I feel really fortunate to live in an area with really fascinating geology," said Bentley, who has lived in this region most of his life.

WITH ACCESS to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., plus the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters in Reston, Callan said a wide array of resources are available for anyone with an interest in what lies on or below the topsoil in Fairfax County.

The creation of the ridges and the basin was the result of two major events: the creation of Rhodima, the first supercontinent, about 1 billion years ago, as it drifted away from what is now North America between 700 million and 570 million years ago, and the collision of Pangea, a better-known supercontinent, with North America. Pangea was created 320 million years ago and broke apart 245 million years ago. The area's geologic history shows two complete cycles of supercontinent formation and break-up. The oldest rocks in Virginia record the assembly of an early supercontinent called Rodinia about 1 billion years ago. Rodinia broke apart, creating a new ocean basin, sometime between 700 and 570 million years ago. Later, than ocean basin was closed as the continents drifted back together. When they collided, they built up the young Appalachian Mountains and assembled Pangea, a better known supercontinent, about 300 million years ago. Pangea then broke up about 200 million years, resulting in the Atlantic Ocean basin.

Stone that had formed on either side of the Pangea collision is metamorphic rock, created by minerals that collected and bonded through melting, while rock in the Culpeper basin is sedimentary rock, when water deposited layers of gravel, sand and mud.

"The Culpeper bBasin is where the Iapetus ocean once stood a rift valley that was formed when Pangea was breaking apart," Bentley said. The ocean was named for the father of the Greek god AtlantisAtlas, for whom the Atlantic Ocean is named. (This origin of the name Iapetus belongs with the discussion of that topic, not in the discussion of the much-younger rifting of Pangea.) "When Pangea opened rifted apart, that's when we got the Atlantic Ocean."

Had the rifts between continents happened differently, it is possible the Atlantic Ocean shoreline could have started in what is now Leesburg, and all the land east of there would be attached to Morocco.

Geologists have looked to the Appalachian Mountains to study plate tectonics, the way the earth under the ocean moves together and apart, Bentley said. Scientists who look to the geologic record to study patterns in the earth's crust believe infer [NOTE: I never use the word "believe" when talking about science: it's a huge pet peeve of mine!] the cycle will repeat again, "probably in 250 million years," Bentley said. "Assuming the world works in a logical way, we can figure out what will happen in the future by what has happened in the past," he said. "We can assume things like gravity, rain and volcanoes existed in the past because we have geological evidence that suggests they existed."

RECENTLY, BENTLEY and a group of his students went on a field trip to Clifton Road, to see if they could find more evidence of the geological rift. John Weidner, a retired math teacher professor who now takes Bentley's classes for the pure joy of learning, said he has learned how to pick out various geological attributes thanks to hands-on educational opportunities.

"The second most important thing I've learned is not something I hear in the classroom, but when a professor corrects my mistakes," Weidner said. "The most important thing I've learned is to go out and look at the rocks to figure out what has happened."

Bentley took his students out to Clifton Road to look at the difference between Piedmont metamorphic rock and Culpeper bBasin sedimentary rock. Unfortunately, the trip did not go as he planned.

"There were about four McMansions built on top of where we were supposed to find rocks, so there was only about a 10-foot wide sliver of open space," Bentley said. "What we were able to find was really interesting."

"It was fascinating, you could really tell where one formation ended and the other began," Weidner said.

Digging into the soil to find rocks to study is not the way most geologists prefer to do their research.

"First off, digging is a lot of hard work and we're kind of lazy," Bentley joked.

But digging into the soil is difficult when the soil is under a parking lot, or someone's house, and getting that kind of permission just does not happen, Weidner said.

"Often, the best outcroppings [NOTE: Like "believe" (above), this is another thing I never say. "Outcroppings" has one more syllable than "outcrops," a word which means the same thing. I prefer "outcrops," just as I prefer the verb "orient" over "orientate."] are the ones that are the easiest to access," Bentley said. He mentioned Sideling Hill in Maryland, a portion of the land that was blasted out to build Interstate 68. Imbedded in the rock is a semi-circle formation of rocks fold created when a lake was filled in with dirt over thousands, if not millions, of years flat-lying sedimentary layers were squeezed by the Pangea-forming tectonic collision.

Thanks to Bentley's classes and field trips, Weidner said he is noticing rock formations and geological events he had missed before.

For the amateur geologist, a lot of wonder and information is waiting to be discovered. For example, hot springs of mineral water are common in the western portion of the United States thanks to underground volcanoes. But there is no explanation for the hot springs just outside Harrisonburg estimated to be 47 million years old, when the youngest rocks on the East Coast are over 100 million years old. But the hot springs near Harrisonburg are enigmatic. Possibly they are related to anomalously-young volcanic rocks nearby. These volcanoes erupted only 47 million years ago, making them the youngest igneous rocks on the East Coast by 100 million years.

"That doesn't make sense to find hot springs there," Bentley said. "But if we had all the answers, life would be boring."

The geology of Fairfax County ranges from slate, schist rock and gneiss (pronounced 'nice') metamorphic rock in the western portion of the county to sedimentary deposits equal to sand covering the Piedmont in the Alexandria area, Bentley said. Drive a little farther south to Quantico, and evidence of the collision of North America and Pangea are evident in rocky outcroppings.

A volunteer at Hidden Oaks, Hidden Pond and Huntley Meadows nature centers, Weidner said plenty of local parks have displays on local geology that are worth investigating, not to mention the larger rock samples at the Smithsonian.

"I'm more interested in the storytelling aspect of geology," he said. "I'm curious about all the questions it raises, like why did Pangea form, why did Africa crash into North America, why did it split apart again?"

David Dantzler, another retiree who has come to geology after a life of wondering at rock formations and all things scientific, said he would prefer to study the rocks around Annandale because it has better specimens of rocks during the Pangea collision.

On top of metamorphic rocks common to the area are rocks found in streambeds from later geologic eras, when streams from the Culpeper basin Appalachian Mountains were reaching out to the newly formed Atlantic Ocean. "When dinosaurs were wandering around Annandale," Dantzler said. "Now, if I close my eyes and imagine all that happening, it is way cool."

Taking natural and historical geology courses has enhanced his travels, Dantzler said, and he hopes other young scholars would consider taking those classes if available to them. But for those who want to see evidence of Fairfax County's past etched in stone, Dantzler suggests a person need go no further than a creek or streambed.

"Much of our geology is obscured by vegetation, but places like Great Falls or our stream valley parks expose a lot of fascinating earth history if you have a good guide like Callan," he said.

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Has anyone else had an experience like this? Being misunderstood is one thing, but misquoted is something else again! I'll write a letter to the editor of the Connection, but the damage has already been done. If I ever speak to a reporter again, I'll insist on fact-checking as a precondition of granting the interview.

If this story has a moral, it is this: Editing is good! Having someone look over your writing before it's published invariably catches errors. Sometimes these errors are minor (like the misspelling of my name in the tenth paragraph) and sometimes they are major (like the garbage being presented here as a geologic history). Peer review is one of the greatest intellectual inventions of mankind. More of us should use it.

UPDATE: I'm convinced anew of the power of complaint. I'm glad that I took the time to write to the editor, and I'm glad that he was willing to work with me to set the record straight. Editing is good.

Labels: nova, pseudoscience