Armored mud balls
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
Yesterday, I showed you a scene of geologists (including me) clustered around some (presumably interesting) outcrop. I asked what you thought we might be looking at. Howard Allen, a denizen of this part of the globe, immediately identified the scene as that of the downstream end of the Athabasca Glacier. Several people guessed that we … Read more
Photo by Sarah O. Tune in tomorrow for the answer!
A cobble of green Belt/Purcell argillite, exposed on the trail to Crypt Lake in Waterton National Park, Alberta, displaying a well-developed “weathering rind”:
In Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, my students and I camped under the shade of cottonwood trees… But some of the cottonwoods’ branches were looking a little thin… Caterpillars were munching on their leaves. And some trees had been completely denuded by the voracious little larvae: All three photos are taken on roughly the same … Read more
Callan’s Canadian Rockies field course visits an outcrop of Cambrian slate in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. Folded and boudinaged carbonatite dikes are seen.
Today, we return to Banff National Park, to the outcrops next to the parking area for Bow River Falls… Zoomed-in closer to the thinner layers at left: These strata (shale and siltstone) were laid down in the quiet aftermath of the Permo-Triassic extinction, as terranes colliding with the edge of North America (far to the … Read more
Click through for a big version… That’s the Athabasca Glacier, crown jewel of the Icefields Parkway in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada. Its lateral moraines show well its retreat and “deflation” in recent years.
Yesterday I showed you salt casts; today I’ll share a different kind of cast: the infillings of small scorings in the sediment made by tumbling pebbles or sticks or other “tools,”tumbling down a current. These small gouges were later infilled from above by a younger deposit of sediment (frequently coarser in grain size). You’re looking … Read more
Callan and his students narrowly miss being stranded in Banff National Park when a rainstorm triggers a mudslide that closes the TransCanada highway.