Here's a couple of more photos from my travels out west this summer. This is in Jackson Hole, the large valley that abuts the Teton Range immediately to the east. If you've never been to the Tetons, you must go and check them out for yourself. They are an awesome, singular mountain range in the United States. Their shapes and sheer relief remind me of the Karakoram, or Torres del Paine, or some other awesome mountainous region of the world. It's really jaw-dropping.

Here's a shot of the Tetons from the northeast, visually pairing them with a line of coniferous trees in the foreground. Photographically, I like this parallelism in their shapes:



So what's up with the Tetons? What geologic processes give rise to their readily-apparent awesomeness? There's two main things going on here: faulting and glaciation. First, there's a major normal fault along the base of the range. The Tetons have moved up as a block while the Jackson Hole basin has dropped down as a block. As the rocks of the Tetons (some as old as 2.8 Ga) have been eroded, sediment was generated, and that dropped down to fill in the hole to the east. Jackson Hole is full of of sediment (over 20,000 feet deep), and then the peaks of the Tetons rise an additional 7000 feet beyond that. Based on offset of the Cambrian Flathead Sandstone on either side of the fault, total displacement is estimated to be 30,000 to 35,000 feet (Love, 1987). Even relatively young geologic units in Jackson Hole, like the Yellowstone-erupted Huckleberry Ridge Tuff (2.1 Ma), dip significantly towards the fault (Good and Pierce, 1996). Movement along this fault is ongoing, raising the mountains on average ~1 centimeter per year, with most movement having taken place over the past 9 million years. The Tetons are generally regarded as the youngest range in the Rockies.

Here's a shot coming north from the Gros Ventre landslide area (subject of a future post) towards the main road. A photogenic herd of bison was grazing on the grassy sagebrush flats, purposely maneuvering between me and the mountains so they would have a nice backdrop:



Once the Pleistocene ice ages began, the tall Tetons accumulated a lot of snow, which packed into glacial ice. Alpine glaciers started flowing downhill, and carving the rock of the mountains as they did so. That created the distinct U-shaped valleys seen in these photos, and left pointy little nubbins between them: the glacial horns like the Grand Teton and Mount Owen. The rocky debris scraped off the Teton block was deposited in Jackson Hole along with till from the Yellowstone ice cap to the north. These piles of glacial till are easily demarcated by the coniferous trees that grow on them, unlike the grasses and sage of the outwash plain.

References:

Good, John M., and Kenneth L. Pierce (1996). Recent and Ongoing Geology of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, Grand Teton Natural History Association, Moose, Wyoming, 58 pages.

Love, J. David (1987). "Teton mountain front, Wyoming." In: Geological Society of America Centennial Field Guide - Rocky Mountain Section, Stanley S. Beus, ed. Geological Society of America, pp. 173-178.

Labels: faults, geology, glacial landforms, travel, wyoming

Picking up from yesterday's post about my hike along Windy Run in Arlington, Virginia...

Just downstream from the waterfall (and crossing the trail) is a recent rockslide. Between D.C. and Great Falls (12 miles upstream), the Potomac River flows through a canyon called the Potomac Gorge. It's hundreds of feet deep overall, and consists of a series of nested straths (bedrock "terraces"), each shaped roughly like (half) a canoe. (At the tip of each canoe is a waterfall leading up to the next strath). Where the vertical distance between straths is great, as it is at Windy Run, mass wasting events serve to break down the cliffs and reduce the crisp profile of the straths.


This rockslide happened in 2005, and the area of "raw" rock up at the top of the cliff reveals the source area for the rock debris below. I wish I had taken a photo of this three years ago when it was really fresh -- it would be an excellent place to do repeat photography to show how the talus pile and cliff face change over time. Upstream are several examples of older talus aprons that have been overgrown by plants and buried in soil. Already, you can see that a few Ailanthus trees (single, upright pole-looking things) have taken root in this fresh landscape.


Once you get down from the Windy Run trail to the Potomac Heritage trail, here's the view of the river, looking upstream. Virginia's on the left; D.C. on the right. A slight "shelf" can be seen on the Virginia side where a notch has been cut to host the George Washington Parkway.


As I hiked along, I found this dead mole. It's a big fat sucker, and it must be quite fresh: probably a casualty from the previous 24 hours. Lens cap is 5 cm in diameter.


More critter evidence: here's a couple of small tree trunks that were decapitated by a beaver. Again, this is recent -- note the fresh curls of wood shavings at the base of the trunk.


But enough with these living entities: let's look at some rocks. This is the metagraywacke rock that makes up most of the Piedmont in our area. This rock is metamorphosed to various degrees up and down the Potomac River, in some places all the way to gneiss and migmatite. In some places, it's schisty, but in others primary sedimentary structures are still preserved. Upstream by Great Falls, for instance, we find graded bedding in isolated less-metamorphosed, less-deformed areas. Down along this stretch of the river, it preserves a diversity of sedimentary clasts, as shown in this image:

Here, you're seeing the graywacke matrix mixed in with a bunch of dark chunks. Today, these dark chunks are mostly biotite, but that's metamorphic. Originally, they were probably mud clasts. Little pebbles of granite and vein quartz are mixed in too. It's worth noting that not only are they metamorphosed, but they're also stretched out in the same direction: foliated and lineated. Many are squashed into X>Y>Z ellipsoidal shapes (where the letters refer to the lengths of the different axes of the ellipsoid), like a mango seed. Lens cap is 5 cm in diameter.

Let's pause for a moment and bring people up to speed if you haven't previously spent any time thinking about Appalachian geology. These rocks are part of the Appalachian mountain belt, which runs from Newfoundland to Georgia (by one definition) or from Texas to Scandanavia (by a more inclusive definition). The Appalachian mountain belt consists of three provinces: from west to east: the Valley and Ridge, the Blue Ridge, and the Piedmont. Two of these are topographically mountainous today: the Valley and Ridge and the Blue Ridge, as their ridgey names imply. But the Piedmont certainly counts as part of the ensemble, and if you compare it to the other two, you'll find that it experienced the most metamorphism, the most deformation, and is intruded in many places with syn-orogenic granites (which neither of "the Ridges" can claim, at least not for Paleozoic orogenies). The Blue Ridge and the Valley and Ridge are deformed, yes, and even lightly metamorphosed, but the Piedmont is really where the action is: this is the center of the ancient Appalachian mountain range. These rocks experienced some serious continental convergence.

So what was the Piedmont before it was the Piedmont? An ocean basin. Before the Atlantic, before Pangea, there was an ocean basin off the "east" coast (it was really the south coast at that point, but no matter...). We call this dead ocean the Iapetus Ocean. The Iapetus was closed via subduction throughout the Paleozoic, and it closed for good when Africa rammed into North America, metamorphosing these rocks and raising the Appalachians. As subduction narrowed the Iapetus, sediments atop the oceanic crust were scraped off in a big jumbled pile called an accretionary wedge. (It is for this mixed-up melange that the infamous geo-blog carnival is named.) You want to see an accretionary wedge being scraped up today? Dive down to the Peru-Chile Trench, off the west coast of South America. You want to see a fresh one at the surface? Visit California's coast ranges, which are a Mesozoic accretionary wedge, raised above sea level. You want to see what an accretionary wedge looks like after it's been tectonically squeezed between two continents? Come to the Piedmont!

Our metamorphosed accretionary wedge consists of a bunch of the sediments that were deposited in the Iapetus Ocean, including what was originally graywacke (a mix of sand & mud). Occasionally, you find a sedimentary clast that's a bit more intriguing, like this one (white arrow):

What intrigues me about this little sedimentary cobble is the fact that it's foliated, which indicates metamorphism and differential pressure, but its foliation does not line up with Appalachian foliation. This cobble was foliated before it was deposited in the accretionary wedge. Therefore, it was derived from some area that had previously experienced mountain building & regional metamorphism (presumably a continent). That ancestral orogenic episode produced a source rock from which this cobble was derived. Then that cobble was deposited by sedimentary processes somewhere and (possibly later) incorporated into the accretionary wedge, which then was metamorphosed (& foliated) itself. Lens cap is 5 cm in diameter.

Here's another one, which shows its foliation a bit better:

When I see something like this, I start to wonder, where did this cobble come from? What was its sedimentary provenance? Is this a North American cobble that attained its foliation in the Grenville Orogeny (~1 Ga)? Is this an African cobble that got squeezed in some pre-Pangea Gondwanan orogeny? Is it derived from a nameless microcontinent that was formerly marooned in Iapetus oceanic crust (a la Madagascar) and is now accreted to some continent as an exotic terrane? Do the answers to these questions change how we think about the (1) closure of the Iapetus, (b) Appalachian Orogeny, (c) assembly of Pangea?

Elsewhere in the Potomac Gorge, there are other clasts in the accretionary wedge complex that encourage similar thoughts (for instance, you can check out the photos at the top of this page). Another question raised by these clasts is this: Does their position amidst such relatively fine grained sediments (the mud and sand of the graywacke) represent original deposition? Or is that simply tectonically-induced "shuffling" in the blender-like environment of the accretionary wedge? The rocks in an accretionary wedge are not stratigraphically coherent, but sometimes they have little areas that are. If these clasts are in their original depositional position relative to the graywacke matrix, what does that tell us? Are these landslide deposits? Or are these "Snowball Earth"-related glacial dropstones? Without the original sedimentary bedding (destroyed via orogenic metamorphosis & deformation), it's impossible to answer these questions, but it sure would be nice to know.

Lastly, I'll note that everything I've talked about so far (metagraywacke, mysterious clasts, quartz veins, granite intrusions, and regional foliation) are all cut by a series of joints, brittle fractures in the rock. These joints are arranged in a series of joint sets which intersect one another, resulting in the "blocky" nature to bedrock exposures in the Potomac Gorge (example). Here, along one Gorge-bounding cliff, I saw that the joints had begun to accomodate some sliding of the blocks of rock on either side. Technically, they aren't joints any longer, but faults, instead. Total offset is only a few inches, but it shows up well in a photo like this. Note the similar sense of motion on the more distant fault "scarp." A housekey (with pink ribbon attached!) is jammed into the closer fault to give a sense of scale.


All in all, an hour strolling along Windy Run provides some terrific opportunities for reflection on the checkered geologic past of the Piedmont and the Appalachians, and the continuing geomorphic evolution of the Potomac Gorge landscape. I enjoyed my little stroll. It was with reluctance that I turned around and headed back to the house to grade exams...

Labels: appalachians, faults, geology, mass wasting, plate tectonics, virginia

This is a fault in a quarry near Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. My friend Annie Kammerer of the NRC sent me the image, and then I annotated it.

First off, notice that the rock is light-colored, with grey and pink tones. I suspect it's a granitoid of the Coast Ranges Batholith (one of many batholiths of the Mesozoic west coast, like the Sierra Nevada and much of Idaho.) The Coast Ranges Batholith extends from "mainland" Mexico to the Baja Peninsula, and up into southern California.

Second, a prominent cross-hatching pattern is seen in the rock. These fractures are two intersecting joint sets. Joints are fractures in rock along which there has been no movement. If the rock on opposites sides of the fracture does move, then it's not a joint; it's a fault. Joints are caused by stresses the rock experiences. Because tectonic stresses are often distributed over a large volume of rock, the rock often develops many joints in the same orientation. A bunch of parallel joints is called a joint set (here's an example from Utah). Joint sets are much more interesting than mere joints because (let's face it) joints are extremely common in rock: they are the most common geologic structure. Joint sets, on the other hand, speak about larger forces and bigger patterns.

The third and final reason for enjoying this photo is that it shows a fault well. Running right down the middle is a prominent fault. Note that the fault is wider than the joints: it's filled with some sort of pulverized goo. This is a material called fault gouge. Faults may or may not have fault gouge in them. It's essentially ground-up rock: any bits that stick out get crushed as the fault grinds over them: like a mortar and pestle smashes up spices. Sometimes when the fault is more planar, the rock rubs directly against its neighbor, producing slickensides. Sometimes, asperities (knobs & bumps on the fracture surface) get snapped off, but not ground into pulp: this produces a fault breccia (like this celebrated example in Death Valley).

I'm struck by how vertical this fault is. Faults come in all sorts of orientations, but there are four really common ones: (1) high-angle normal faults which dip at an average of 60º into the Earth, (2) low-angle reverse faults which dip at an average of 30º into the Earth, (3) extremely-low-angle thrust faults, which can be close to horizontal, and (4) vertical strike-slip faults, which dip at 90º, or close to it. This appears to be the latter. Annie, the photographer, tells me that there was a substantial (~100 m) offset along this fault. If you looked down on it from a bird's-eye view, you might be able to tell that, but it's impossible to gauge the offset from this cross-sectional view.

Final observations: the fault is oriented the same way as one of the joint sets. It's likely that the rock was jointed first, and then when tectonic stresses required strike-slip faulting, one of those joints (a pre-existing plane of weakness) was utilized as the site of movement. Note too up in the upper-left another "joint" seems filled with fault gouge, meaning it's really another (parallel) fault. That would be entirely expected if a jointed rock was being tectonically smeared out. The vertical "slices" of rock migrate past one another like a sheared loaf of (sliced) bread. Some of the slices adhere along their cut surface, whereas others move. Some of the joints become faults, but once they start moving, the stress is accommodated, and there's no reason for every joint to become a fault. The weakest link takes all the strain.

Labels: faults, joints, mexico