structure

Cleaved, boudinaged, folded Edinburg Formation southwest of Lexington

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Explore a dozen photos highlighting the structural geology of an outcrop of limestone and shale near Lexington, Virginia. Cleavage refraction, overturned beds, boudinage, folds, and even a small fossil – we’ve got something for everyone. Bring the whole family!

Friday fold: Buckled at Baltinglass

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Garnetiferous beds from the aureole of the Leinster Granite east of Baltinglass, County Wicklow, Ireland (Declan De Paor’s senior thesis mapping area, 1973). Manganese-rich metasediments. The prominent ‘elasticas’ or fan folds (folds with a negative inter-limb angle) are superimposed on isoclinal folds: so the brownish layer at top and bottom are the same, though that … Read more

Friday fold: one from the archive

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As noted previously, my colleague Declan De Paor recently retired from Old Dominion University, and I was lucky enough to inherit some of his rock samples. I’ve been making super-high resolution images of the samples ever since. Here’s a particularly striking fold, weathered out differentially. Enjoy exploring it – and have a happy final Friday … Read more

Fossils as strain markers: the boudinaged belemnites of the Swiss Alps

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Don’t you hate it when plate tectonics ruins a perfectly good fossil? This is a sketch of a belemnite from the Swiss Alps: The thing has been broken into segments, with calcite filling the gaps between the segments. What a bummer! Now we’re going to have a much harder time reconstructing the life habits of … Read more

Friday fold: orogeny in a cobble

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Happy Friday. Thank goodness it’s the last one before this horrible election season finally concludes. Let’s celebrate with two cobbles from the beach at Papil Water, Fetlar, Shetland. They show small-scale folds in metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks of Ordovician or Silurian age, part of the ophiolite complex that makes up most of Fetlar. Each is … Read more

Friday folds: Dalradian schists at St. Ninian’s Isle

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Remember St. Ninian’s Isle? It is connected to Mainland Shetland by a tombolo. But it has rocks there, too. Here are some outcrops on the beach: If you visit these schisty fins, you’ll find they are populated by a cavalcade of small folds. Some of the folds are crisp things known as kink bands: Annotated … Read more

Friday fold: Lewisian gneiss near Tarbet, North-West Highlands, Scotland

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A quick Friday fold here from the North-West Highlands of Scotland: These are Lewisian gneisses exposed on a headland northwest of the little outpost of Tarbet (where the Handa Island ferry departs from). I was out there in search of shear zones, but I found plenty of nice folds, too. There are two main folds … Read more

Friday fold: The walls of Scalloway Castle

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When in Shetland, one of my first stops was the museum in Scalloway, and one of the ancillary benefits of visiting there is the castle next door: Scalloway Castle includes building stones derived from the local limestone – a Neoproterozoic unit that has recently been chemostratigraphically correlated with Snowball Earth cap carbonates elsewhere in the … Read more

Cushendun Conglomerate of the Cross Slieve Group, Northern Ireland

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Want a geological irony? Here’s one! You’re looking at a rounded boulder of Cushendun Conglomerate, a Devonian “Old Red Sandstone” unit (Cross Slieve Group) exposed at Cushendun Caves, Northern Ireland, U.K. The irony lies in the repetition of history – a tumbling environment of high water energy, rounding cobbles and boulders and depositing them, in … Read more

Two virtual weathered-out dikes in a fjord in eastern Iceland

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Two 3D models for you today, both produced by my student Marissa Dudek, using photo sets I gathered in Iceland: Photoscan model by Marissa Dudek (That one has paleomag holes drilled into it!) Photoscan model by Marissa Dudek (That one I’m particularly pleased with. Given the circumstances of image acquisition, this is a very good … Read more