A final Friday fold (for now) from Howard Allen: This is : A view south across Kananaskis Lakes, Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, Alberta, through mist/low-hanging clouds. Snow highlights the Sarrail Creek Syncline and Warspite Anticline on the north faces of mounts Fox (left/east) and Foch (right/west). Rocks are Lower Carboniferous carbonates of the Banff, Livingstone … Read more
View of Lawson Syncline looking obliquely along strike (SSE) from an unnamed peak SW of Mount Inflexible, Kananaskis Range, Alberta. The axis of the syncline forms the bottom of the valley and plunges slightly toward the south. The syncline is in the hanging wall of the Sulphur Mountain Thrust sheet. On the right side of … Read more
Howard Allen is the Friday folder who keeps on giving… Here’s his latest: Multiple folds at top of ridge, Opal Range, Alberta. Photographed from Kananaskis Highway 40, looking SE. Beds are Carboniferous carbonates, probably Mount Head and/or Etherington formations. There are lots of great folds to be seen along that road. The Kananaskis Trail is … Read more
Another Friday, another Friday fold from Howard Allen: Folds in near-vertical beds, north side of Grizzly Creek, Opal Range, Alberta. Beds are Carboniferous carbonates, Mount Head and Etherington formations. Enjoy your day!
Howard Allen, a retired petroleum geologist from Calgary, and longtime reader of this blog, contributed this week’s Friday fold: Subglacial drag fold (Pleistocene) in Upper Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon Fm. bedrock (sandstone, shale). The locality is SE of Drumheller, AB at UTM 12U 394247 5692469 (WGS84). Did you hear that right? Yes, you did: This is … Read more
At the Spiral Tunnels overlook on the Trans-Canada Highway, you can look at trains. Or, you can check out some lovely trace fossils in boulders which divide the viewing area from the highway: These are in the Gog Formation, a Cambrian-aged quartz arenite, mostly fused to quartzite nowadays… I know which subject I would choose … Read more
The coarser strata of the Neoproterozoic Miette Group in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta record changing water current strength over time, and maybe an iceberg or two.
Elizabeth Kosters contributed this week’s Friday fold: It’s from Rainy Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada. Click through to read Elizabeth’s post on the site. Happy Friday!
Check out the argillite boulder in the left midground of this GigaPan, which I’ve showed here before. It was taken at the Icefields Center parking area in Jasper National Park, Alberta: link There, you’ll find some lovely orange lichens, some iron oxide staining, some graffiti, and a fair number of sub-aligned glacial striations. Also, at … Read more
I love moraines, rocky beaches, gravel bars – they are like a giant smorgasbord of delicious goodies. Here, for instance, are some close-ups of a trilobite-bearing boulder on the south lateral moraine of the Athasbasca Glacier, Jasper National Park, Alberta. And what are these things? Any ideas?
Some boulders seen on the trail to Helen Lake sported lovely sets of Skolithos trace fossils. Here are two boulders, with the perspective on the tubular paleo-vertical Skolithos burrows being “map view”: Another boulder, in the middle of the trail, showed them in a fine cross-sectional view: (click to enlarge substantially) It also included some … Read more
Look at this! A whole boulder made of trace fossils. Three photos, each more progressively zoomed in than the last. Update: The @ichnologist identifies these as perhaps Thalassinoides.
That pretty much speaks for itself, I reckon.
Posted this morning as my “Christmas gift” to blog readers in both photo and GigaPan form, here are the exquisite stromatolites of Helen Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta. link link link link link link link Finally, three other non-stromatolitic GigaPans from the site: One of Artomys Formation siltstone / shale interbeds… link …and two of … Read more
The exquisite stromatolites of Helen Lake, Banff National Park, are presented in photographic and GigaPan renditions. Enjoy unwrapping them as your “Christmas gift” from Callan.
A hike to Helen Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, brings your intrepid geoblogger face to face with a fresh landslide and a curious landform parallel to the glacial valley. Is it a pro-talus rampart?
Two years ago, I posted on some interesting structures my students and I saw at Consolation Lakes, near Moraine Lake in Banff National Park. They were little concretions, “oncoids” roughly speaking, and may have indicated (thanks Howard!) that the boulders were sourced to the Peyto Formation, a Cambrian carbonate within the Gog group: The purpose … Read more
Want to see something cool? Itty bitty stromatolites… like baby’s fingers! There’s a big weathered-out stylolite at the base of this stromatolite-bearing layer, too. These elfin stromatolites are part of the boulder in the lower left (foreground) of this GigaPan, taken at the Icefields Center parking area in Jasper National Park, Alberta: link
“Kablooey!”
Let’s journey to the Cretaceous today, to see sandstones, shales, and even some coal strata that have been folded during the eastward thrusting that built the Canadian Rockies. Here’s the same fold, in context, shot in GigaPan on a different day, from a different angle. Can you match it up? link Ben Gadd showed me … Read more