Yesterday, I posted a panorama and asked you what you saw. Responses offered as comments on the blog were modest, but there was more activity on Twitter: Here are those responses:
@theAGU @callanbentley I see some really cool layering of rocks. I wish I knew more about geology.
— Justin Shinohara (@JustinShinohara) August 11, 2015
@theAGU @callanbentley @AGU_Eos An angular unconfornity. — Mr. Cesaire (@sedrock79) August 11, 2015
@callanbentley Maybe a fold starting from the tilted layers on the left and down towards the middle and up again? — Mr. Cesaire (@sedrock79) August 12, 2015
@theAGU @callanbentley Evidence that in the rock-paper-scissors of geology, human beats geomorphology, but geomorphology beats structure! — Jean Dixon (@GeoJeannie) August 12, 2015
The best place for eliciting responses, however, appeared to be the AGU Facebook page.
What do you see here?http://ow.ly/QL4Ps (Mountain Beltway at #AGUblogs)
Posted by American Geophysical Union (AGU) on Tuesday, August 11, 2015
2 RepliesJuan Leonardo Vargas Fault line,also there are a number of features that resemble faces, some on the cutaway and also in the tree branches and also a person, ,possibly a boy about 10 or 11 yrs.old..Wajahat Abbasi Thurst fault smile emoticonClark Davis Not sure but thanks for asking!!Ted Asher the face of Jesus?Joe Miller A guy ready to jump.Sean Daniels anticline, syncline, with lower volcanics.. some local to regional faulting and folding as the driver of the structure.Aradia Farmer reverse thrust fault, mud, rocks, grass, trees, human
Scott Ehlert You can’t tell much for certain but probably a fault. Could be a slide or something else.Travis Boser Waldo!Devon Dowell UnconformityElaine Tanner FaultMassimo Moretti A thrust?Arslan Zaheer A man with a white shirt .tongue emoticonSaeed Kamboh thurst faultJake Fabian Phosfat hanging wall and foot wallDavid Glueck History all historyWilliam Allen Thompson a potentialPhùng Văn Phách Active fault!Ammar Yousaf thrust faultDana Roxanne Widmark Kid with a tripod camera perch, and a bunch of geological terms I can’t remember.Xela Sabungero earthquake fault lineJames Nicholas Hervey Half a collapsed hill with no clearly defined strata.Abimbola Ogunyele fault & jointsMarc Davison a good place to mine…and an ancient thrust fault ?
Some of those appear to be earnest efforts at interpreting this outcrop. Others are typical Facebook gobbledygook and people being smartasses.
If you’re one of those who’s interested in figuring this thing out, we’ll take the next step today. I’ll ask you to take another look, this time with annotations sketched in. I’ve traced out bedding (where visible) in the version of the image below:
Click to enlarge
Additional clues: these are Pennsylvanian aged strata exposed near the eastern edge of the Alleghany Plateau in northern West Virginia, along a newly-opened stretch of Corridor H, the east-west highway that has been under construction here for the better part of a decade.
Does that change your opinion of what’s going on here?
To only make a comment on what I said on the previous post. If that is an angular unconformity then the dang thing is completely overturned. That’s the reason I dismissed it in my previous comment.