Friday fold: Nice gneiss from Salt Lake, Utah

Another guest Friday fold… this one from my colleague Tiffany Rivera of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, the one who brought you yesterday’s thrombolite pictures… Tiffany writes that these shots come from a man-made boulder field / berm along the lake. The boulders were these beautifully folded gneisses. Antelope Island exposes some of … Read more

Refuge, by Terry Tempest Williams

When Michael Collier came to visit last year, he recommended a couple of books to me. I finally got around to reading the first of them – Refuge, a memoir mixed with natural history of Utah by Terry Tempest Williams. The arc of the story is essentially twofold: the women in Williams’ family get cancer, … Read more

More moki marbles

More moki marbles: little concretions in sandstone, kind of like the ones I showed you Tuesday from Illinois. But these ones are from the Navajo Sandstone, a late Triassic or early Jurassic erg deposit from the Colorado Plateau. These photos were taken in Zion National Park, near Springdale, Utah (real close to the cross-beds I … Read more

The best cross-bedding you’ll ever see

Setting aside the lack of scale, it really doesn’t get any better than that. Click through to make it huge. This is the Navajo Sandstone, early Jurassic (or late Triassic?) in age. It’s in Zion National Park, Utah. Wind direction was from the right towards the left, as these preserved slip-faces of ancient dunes indicate. … Read more