Transect debrief 7: Brittle-ductile deformation

On the transect trip, I also saw some nice meso-scale “minor” structures that probably formed during Alleghanian deformation. Prominent among the ones that really impressed me were these en echelon tension gash arrays, deforming the Antietam Formation quartz sandstone and well exposed in blocks used to construct the wall along Skyline Drive and the Sandy Bottom Overlook in Shenandoah National Park:

Good Lord! Ain’t those things beautiful? They also give us a lovely sense of the kinematics (relative motions) of the blocks of Antietam sandstone on either side of this sheared zone. In the case of the image above, the left side of the photo has moved “down” relative to the right side. The rock in between has torn and stretched, with the gashes opening up at right angles to the maximum stretching direction. As deformation proceeds, of course, the gashes rotate and deform, folding into “S” shapes.

Here’s one that’s more subtle:

What you’re looking at in the image immediately above is a tension gash array that was a zone of weakness, exploited by later brittle deformation. The fracture which defines the edge of this block cracked through those old brittle-ductile tension gashes and split them clean in half.

Neat, eh? …Now check this out:

Remember the Skolithos trace fossils? Here, you’re looking at a sideways cross section through some cylindrical Skolithos as they are disrupted by this zone of shearing. Note that the burrows tend to be highlighted by rust (hematite) staining: the brown lines that run roughly from the top left of the photo towards the bottom right. But look what happens to the orientation of those tubes where they are cut by the tension gash arrays: they are deflected into a new orientation, rotated from their original orientation!

If that’s a bunch of gobbledygook to you, consider this annotation:

I’ve drawn white lines to show the orientation of the Skolithos tubes in their undeformed and deformed states, colored the tension gashes yellow, and drawn on a set of blue arrows to show my kinematic interpretation (top to the left).

Here’s another block, showing the same phenomenon:

Go ahead. Tell me you’re not impressed with that. I dare you. That is frakking AWESOME.

You are now dismissed.