A new post on GeoSpace, a sister blog here at the AGU Blogosphere, calls attention to a new study by Simon Lamb and colleagues on the plate-boundary fault running through New Zealand’s South Island, the Alpine Fault. The post is apparently taken and lightly adapted from a press release on the Victoria University of Wellington … Read more
The answer to this week’s geological interpretation contest is revealed, sort of. Annotations, GigaPans, and outcrop detail photos reveal the story of equatorial fluvial incision and ancient slumping during the Carboniferous ice ages.
Some time ago, I featured as Friday fold the extraordinarily complex duplex structure to be seen in the Cretaceous “gastropod limestone” member of the Kootenai Formation at Sandy Hollow, Montana. Today, let’s take a deeper look through a couple of hand-shot GigaPan images: Here’s the bigger of the two: link Here’s one with students for … Read more
Here’s a really cool hand sample my student Xiuming found when were were exploring the waste rock piles at the Golden Sunlight Mine near Whitehall, Montana, the week before last: That’s a vein of pyrite and chalcopyrite, offset along a series of three small fault zones: Pocket faults! Three for the price of one.
Here’s another sight at the Eocene dikes site in Bluegrass Valley, Virginia, mentioned yesterday: That’s a gorgeous fault breccia, emplaced parallel to bedding, and parallel to the felsic dike (which can be found a few feet to the west / right of these photos): It was very poorly lithified, shockingly crumbly to the touch, considering … Read more
Kim Hannula shares a fold today: Kim says: The rocks folded here mostly the Devonian Ouray Limestone. There’s a fault through the outcrop, and another fault to the left of the photo. Regionally, the faults are mapped as normal faults, mostly with the east (right in photo) side down. Locally, that’s not what I see … Read more
When visiting Athens, Greece, you are drawn to the Parthenon’s grand architecture atop the hill called the Acropolis. But why is the Acropolis a hill?
Driving west from Calgary, your first evidence of entering the Canadian Rockies’ Front Ranges is the startling sheer cliff of Yamnuska, north of the Trans-Canada Highway: Yamnuska’s shape is a function of differential weathering of the two rock units that make up the mountain: Cambrian Eldon Formation limestone, and Cretaceous shales of the Brazeau Formation. … Read more
Callan’s Rockies field course students document faulting and jointing in Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.
My student Mercer Parker shot this one over to me the other day: Click to enlarge Those are the slim strata of the Rome Formation (a.k.a. Shady*), strongly deformed in the region adjacent to the Max Meadows (“M&M”?) Fault. Thanks, Mercer! _____________________________________________ * Will the real slim Shady please stand up?
Here’s a breccia that Dan Doctor and I found in a tabular zone within the Helderberg Group (Devonian limestones) in one of the massive new roadcuts along Corridor H. link Is it a fault breccia or a sedimentary breccia? The breccia was bedding parallel, which suggests it could be just another bed, but it’s so … Read more
The Friday fold visits the Permian basin of west Texas. There, the Castile Formation exhibits gorgeous inter- and intra-bed folding.
While at the Vulcan Quarry in Manassas, Virginia, a few weeks ago, the principle interesting feature I saw on the individual blocks of rock we sorted through was slickensides. I saw dozens and dozens of examples, in both the hornfels and the diabase, but here are five nice examples to share: No sense of scale … Read more
My favorite rocks are those that tell multiple stories – rocks that are “palimpsest” with subsequent “chapters” of their biography capable of being teased out, based on different features to be observed in the rock. Click to enlarge What can we see in this small sample of the Silurian-aged Tonoloway limestone, from Corridor H, West … Read more
Here’s something fun: Click to enlarge Those strata are Silurian-aged Tonoloway Formation carbonates. There are plenty of dessication cracks to be seen, as well as salt casts, among the layers exposed. But more eye-catching at this distance is the faulting that disrupts the high-contrast layers… Both (apparent) normal and reverse faults can be seen in … Read more
Click to enlarge You owe it to yourself to click through and make this bigger. Check out the prominent lower left to upper right thrust fault, and the shattering in the shorter limb of the underlying syncline. Is that another one to the right? Happy exploring, and happy Friday!
Here’s a fold I saw in Texas, in the Mesilla Valley shale, close to the contact with the Muleros Andesite at Cristo Rey: This is a pretty wild looking fold. Let’s zoom in on the most deformed portion: Annotation: white is top of the distinctive, blocky, buckled bed, and black is its bottom side. Red … Read more
I saw this fault in Texas, north of the laccolith known as Cristo Rey: Click to enlarge I had a hard time making sense of the offset in my head, though, since the layers were of inconsistent thickness. Several people tried to convince me that the offset was “normal” (that is, right side down), but … Read more
Hark! What gleams on yonder contact? Well, there’s no glaciers to polish anything ’round these here parts (southernmost New Mexico + westernmost Texas), so I reckon it must be fault polish. Let’s test that hypothesis by looking for slickensides… Sure enough! There they are! Unlike the deformation we saw yesterday, this faulting of the contact … Read more
Longtime reader and frequent contributor Howard Allen has three images to share with us today. Let’s see what he’s got… Oh my. What is that? West ridge of Mount Evan-Thomas, Opal Range, Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, Alberta. View looking south across Grizzly Creek at structural features (yellow boxes outline detail images to highlight key features, … Read more