On our Historical Geology field trip to Washington, DC, this weekend, we were down at Chain Bridge Flats and saw some fresh flood mud deposited by the flooding Potomac. It was a gelatinous goo, like pudding, but had some lovely dessication cracks developing. Here are a couple of photos, courtesy of student Ana C., with a penny for scale in each:

Labels: primary structures, rivers, sediment

Here's a sample I collected along the road in the Sierra foothills when I was in California the weekend before last. It's a nice little hand sample of amygdules: vesicles (lava degassing bubbles) that have gotten infilled with mineral deposits. I just slapped it on the scanner along with a penny. Enjoy!

Labels: igneous, primary structures, volcano

Today I took a group of students to Sideling Hill, a syncline in western Maryland. Here are a few photos from the trip. All photos by my iPhone, via Facebook (which is why the quality is lower than my usual standards):

The group all kitted out at the Sideling Hill Visitor's Center (which was closed due to budget cuts in Maryland):


Jared points out fast-weathering shale layers betwixt slower-weathering sandstone layers:


Diamictite outcrop on the far western side of Sideling Hill:


More diamictite... enigmatic sediments...

Labels: maryland, nova, primary structures, sediment, structure, teaching, valley and ridge, weathering

Went for a hike on the good old Billy Goat Trail last Sunday and saw this beautiful outcrop. I love it how every time I walk that trail, I see something new and blog-worthy. Here you see the metagraywacke of the Mather Gorge Formation getting squished and squeezed under conditions of partial melting. Granitic magma (light-colored rock) is leaking out, while the foliated mafic residue (schist chips) are getting strung out and boudinaged under conditions of mountain-building. This granite yeilds late Ordovician isotopic ages (Taconian Orogeny, ~460 Ma).

Seeing an outcrop like this reminds me of making cheese: squeezing the liquid whey (felsic magma) out from the solid curds (higher-melting-temperature solid minerals like those comprising the 'schist chip' boudins). As orogenic forces squeeze from the sides, granite oozes out the top.

I love that there are outcrops where this process is caught in freeze-frame: not all the granite escaped from its migmatitic source rock here; instead the process stopped before it was complete, and through the luck of uplift and exposure by the probing erosion of the Potomac, we get a glimpse of a fundamental process in making the Earth look the way it does. A single outcrop shows rocks that were oceanic sediments, then became metamorphic schist, and now are were transitioning to igneous granite! That's pretty wild. We have caught the rock cycle red-handed.

Labels: analogies, granite, igneous, maryland, metamorphism, piedmont, primary structures

My third day in Montana this summer, Lily and I took a hike in the Bridger Range, going up the west side of the range via Corbly Gulch to a cirque opposite the "usual" route up Sacagawea Peak, which starts at Fairy Lake on the east side, then goes up into Sacagawea Cirque* and south to the peak. Instead, we went up Corbly Gulch and got a whole new look at Bridger stratigraphy. First, orient yourself with this topographic map:



The Fairy Lake route brings you to the ridge crest from the upper right (northeast), wheras the Corbly Gulch route brings you to the same ridge crest from the lower left (southwest). Now take a look at some satellite imagery:



The green line at upper right is the ridge crest; Sacagawea Peak is just off-screen to the right. It will not surprise you to learn that stratigraphic contacts strike NW-SE in this area. The forested left-hand part of the screen is underlain by Mesoproterozoic LaHood Formation, a coarse-grained formation in the Belt Supergroup. Then there's a little gap of grassy area and a thin line of trees atop a light-brownish layer. This is the Cambrian Flathead Sandstone, which is chock-full of interesting sedimentary structures and trace fossils. The prominent light-colored ridge-forming layer traversing the screen from upper left towards lower right is the Cambrian Pilgrim Limestone, which shows "fossil hurricanes" in the form of limestone-chip conglomerates.

Here's some of the trace fossils in the Flathead Sandstone:


Here's a limestone-chip conglomerate from the Pilgrim Limestone, which I interpret as a paleo-hurricane deposit: rip-up clasts from a carbonate bank tumbled and re-deposited together in a big jumble:


We hiked up to the ridge, and peered down into Sacagawea Cirque (getting pummeled by the wind!), but didn't feel like we had sufficient time to attempt summiting Sacagawea, since I had to be back on MSU's campus for an evening session as part of "Bahama Montana" class. More on that tomorrow...

______________________________
* The following week, my Regional Field Geology students proposed to rename Sacagawea Cirque as "Death Cirque," for reasons I will explain in due course...

Labels: cambrian, fossils, limestone, montana, msse, primary structures, proterozoic, sediment

A funny coincidence transpired a couple of weeks ago. I posted about "Amygdules!" and so did Andrew. We were both so excited by these cool primary igneous structures that we added an exclamation point to our post titles. Over the weekend, I found some more. These are in Dark Hollow, in Shenandoah National Park, above the falls. Pretty sweet, eh?



I hereby give them two exclamation points. Let's see if anyone else can come up with two-exclamation-point-worthy examples of amygdules...

Labels: basalt, blogs, blue ridge, falls, igneous, primary structures, proterozoic, shenandoah

Amygdules (mineral deposits filling extrusive vesicles) in the Neoproterozoic-aged Catoctin Formation meta-basalt, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.

Labels: basalt, blue ridge, igneous, primary structures, proterozoic

So, it's a month until my Rockies class starts. I've been encouraging all the students to get in shape, because the high elevations, rough terrain and multimile distances we'll be hiking in Montana and Wyoming could really kick an east-coast flatlander's arse. So we've scheduled a few training hikes to help everyone physically prepare for the Rockies experience. Last weekend, we did a 5.5-mile circuit up the steep Little Devil's Stairs trail in Shenandoah National Park. I was joined by five Rockies students + one of their kids. Here's a map of the loop we did:



Here's a few photos of the hike, and the geology we encountered along the way:



John poses next to some jointed columns in the Catoctin Formation, a Neoproterozoic rift-related series of flood basalts (subsequently metamorphosed during Alleghenian mountain building).


End-on view of one of the columns:


Overhanging cliff showing columns weathering out along jointed surfaces:


Bob poses next to a cliff, helping me demonstrate how difficult it is to take a well-exposed photo in the jungle of the Virginia hardwood forest:


A wiggle in some columns:


Jared thought these columns were better than the first ones he saw, at Old Rag Mountain.


Here's me with a fifteen-foot-long section of columns, indicating that the flow from which this boulder was derived must have been at least fifteen feet thick, maybe more:




But it wasn't all columns. There was also a lot of column-less massive Catoctin Formation, and some nice inter-flow conglomerates which are interpreted as stream deposits that developed atop a cooled flow before the next flow erupted. These conglomerates imply a reasonable amount of time passed between successive eruptions of the Catoctin flood basalts. The lichens obscure the rock, but note for instance the fingernail-sized chunk of greenstone an inch above my hand:


More chunks in the conglomerate:


And more:


Jared guards the way forward:


The view from the top:

Labels: basalt, iapetus, igneous, metamorphism, nova, primary structures, proterozoic, sediment, shenandoah, structure, teaching

Dear readers,

Here's a list of the samples I'd really like to have to show my students examples of the processes we discuss:

• A lava pillow (maybe a pillow basalt). Fresh would be best, so I could show the outer crust of obsidian, and the inner basalt. An ancient pillow would be second best.


• Boudinage. A nice hand sample of boudinage, maybe a granite dike in a shist? Or a sandstone stratum within a shale matrix? I feel like I should already have one of these, but I don't... All the good local examples are too big.


• Flame structures/ball-&-pillow soft sediment deformation.


• A komatiite sample.


• One of these. (Eubrontes track with radiating mudcracks, featured this morning on ReBecca's Dinochick Blogs)

I've been a good boy this year. Anybody got any spares they want to trade for some nice Skolithos-bearing cobbles? (...or something else we've got a local supply of?) I'll pay shipping!

If not, please alert Santa that I'd appreciate him filling my stocking with these goodies,

Callan

Labels: basalt, igneous, primary structures, structure, teaching

After seeing the feldspar megacrysts in Maryland's Ellicott City Granodiorite two days ago, I wanted to share some even more impressive megacrysts, those found on the periphery of the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite pluton ['CPGD'] in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.

Here's a typical look at the CPGD close to its contact with metasedimentary & metavolcanic host rocks. It's chock-full of 3-7 cm crystals of potassium feldspar, set in a more typical-looking granodioritic matrix of sub-0.5 cm crystals:

This is a nice example of an intrusive porphyry. Not all porphyritic textures result from two phase cooling: The way the story usually goes is that the magma starting underground at a realtively slow rate, then the magma (solid crystals + remaining liquid) gets tapped and erupts, with the rest cooling at a faster rate on the surface. This one clearly shows a phaneritic (coarse-grained) texture throughout; it's just that some crystals grew bigger than others. I'm not an igneous petrologist, so I won't claim to understand why. Enlighten me if you know.

Here is a close-up of one feldspar crystal shows lines of mafic inclusions (earlier-crystallizing minerals like amphibole which were caught up in the advancing front of feldspar crystallization, and trapped in the larger feldspar crystal):

My mind wants to see this as a spiral pattern, like a snowball garnet, and hence to interpret this as a feldspar crystal rotating as it grew, but that's surely wishful thinking. Especially seeing as how there's no foliation to get wrapped up in the 'rotating' porphyroblast. But... I've never seen another igneous crystal that shows this same pattern. Anyone else? Trick of the light?

Now here's something really wild:

Recall that when I took these photographs in 2003, I was out in the Sierras looking at the Sierra Crest Shear Zone, a 1-2 kilometer wide zone of smooshed rocks adjacent to the eastern boundary of the Sierra Nevada Batholith. So mainly I was interested in these older "host rocks" which were metavolcanic and metasedimentary, but I was also interested in how they related to the batholith as a whole. In places, I could see clear evidence that the plutons of the batholith were sheared, too, and in other places they appeared to have intruded post-deformation. This photo shows that the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite came along after the bulk of the deformation had happened.

How do we know? (1) It's not especially foliated itself. (2) Here, magma oozed between the foliation layers in the metasedimentary rocks immediately adjacent to the pluton. These layers flexed to allow the magma to intrude; I think of curtains billowing underwater. Then, as the pluton inflated (or as regional deformation continued to squeeze these rocks; or both), a compressive stress was exerted on these mingled layers of foliated rocks and magma. The liquid magma squished out of the way, but the solid megacrysts were trapped, and the foliation flexed and wrapped around them.

Twisted food analogy: Say I make a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. (Seriously, they're good!) I have a piece of bread, and I smear it with a mix of creamy peanut butter and chunky raisins (the giant ones from Trader Joe's). I place another piece of bread on top. Then, because I value my geology more than my manners, I lean over like I'm going to perform CPR, and exert pressure perpendicular to the plane of the bread. The peanut butter, being ductile, squishes out the sides, while the raisins are trapped, and the bread deforms around them.

Such, such are the thoughts of the hungry field geologist...

Labels: analogies, california, granite, metamorphism, minerals, primary structures

When I visited the exposures along newly-minted New Route 55 in West Virginia in March, I was so impressed, I decided to bring my structural geology students there on our trip. Now, after two stops in the Blue Ridge and a late afternoon anticlinorama, we woke, broke camp, and ate some great eggs and sausage (mine were swimming in coffee due to an accident with the French Press, but hey -- it all goes the same place, right Ben?) and set off to the west.

Hanging Rock Anticline roadcut:


Hanging Rock Anticline as viewed from the valley of the Lost River, where Old Route 55 wends and winds:


Ben, Dave, and Joe on the berm (note the thrust fault above their heads):


Plenty of primary structures to be seen here, too, like these trace fossils:


A hand-sample of trace-fossils (Arthrophycus, I think):


...or this beauty:


Small reverse fault with an offset of ~1 meter:


Here's a fossil (??) that I don't understand and cannot identify. I saw four of these out there. Can anyone (Tom, ReBecca?) help me identify this sucker and understand how it formed?










We moved on down the road a bit, to this lovely monocline (Jim & Jay for scale):


John, Karine, & Ryan take a closer look at primary and secondary structures in these strata:


Lovely flute casts:


Plumose structure #1:


Plumose structure #2:


Paleo-river channels incised into these strata (at the time of their deposition):


Reduction "halo" around a carbonaceous plant fragment fossil:


Ripple marks:


More plant fossils (these were the largest I saw):


Lots of carbon films of shredded up plant chunks:


Ball & pillow / flame structures:


Ditto, and note the graded bedding in the upper sandstone layer, too:


Great trip, everyone! Thanks!

Labels: field trips, fossils, primary structures, sediment, structure, teaching, valley and ridge, west virginia

Now that we've visited a couple of stops in the Blue Ridge province, it was was time for my Structural Geology class to head out to the Valley & Ridge province.

We made a brief stop to be introduced to the Massanutten Sandstone (Silurian quartz sandstone to quartzite) at Blue Hole, where we noticed this fault zone:


...But the main show was up in Veach Gap, where there's a zillion parasitic folds on the larger Massanutten Synclinorium. This was our third Field Study Area. The anticlines are beautifully expressed in human-sized outcrops, while the intervening synclines are lost in the subsurface:














In spite of this profound deformation, there are still some primary structures to be seen, like these Arthrophycus (?) trace fossils...


...and these external molds of articulate brachiopods:


As you might be able to deduce from the angle of light in these photographs, we hit this site late in the day, and then went back to camp at a site Dave knew of, by a lovely creek. Jim and Joe cooked us an amazing dinner of pasta and meatballs, and we hung out by the campfire a bit before bed. Sleep, and then up and at 'em the next morning to move on to our final Field Study Area... (more on that tomorrow)

Labels: fossils, primary structures, sediment, silurian, structure, valley and ridge

After the Garth Run high-strain zone and a night hanging out by the campfire at Heavenly Acres with the William and Mary Structural Geology class, the second stop on our Structural Geology trip was in Shenandoah National Park, looking at the deformed meta-basalt columns on the Limberlost Trail. Longtime readers of the blog have seen these unique (in my experience) columns before, in a post from last May.

This is an outcrop of the Catoctin Formation, a series of (mainly) basaltic lava flows that erupted sometime older than 565 Ma (only the youngest, rhyolitic layers have been dated, and evidence suggested that significant amounts of time may have passed between the eruption of each stratum of basalt deeper down in the stratigraphic stack). As the lava cooled, it developed cooling fractures that formed perpendicular to the isotherms. These fractures likely initiated at the top and the bottom of the flow, and propagated towards the middle over time.

Later, during Alleghenian mountain-building (~300 Ma to ~250 Ma, roughly), the rocks were subjected to greenschist-facies metamorphism, and were deformed. The basalt's consituent minerals re-equilibrated and reacted to become other minerals, most notably chlorite and epidote (both of which are green).

Here's John and Joe checking out the columns:


Exquisite! Even arrest lines on the side of each column are preserved. In an undeformed basalt column, these arrest lines would be perpendicular to the column edge. Here, they have a pronounced angular relationship, indicating the shearing of the overall column:


Bobby measures the angular shear along the length of the column:




Goofball professor poses with column:


Jay plays the column like an electric guitar:


We found some nice plumose structure too:


Finally, we evaluated the concentric rings of minerals filling amygdules (vesicles that had been infilled with mineral deposits after lithification) in an attempt to determine whether they could be used as strain markers, or whether they may have attained their ellipsoidal shapes due to stretching of the bubbles in the originial lava (i.e. like this) and then been infilled with minerals:




...and then we were off to Field Study Area #3...

Labels: appalachians, basalt, field trips, igneous, metamorphism, national parks, primary structures, proterozoic, shenandoah, structure, teaching

The backlog of photos from my hikes several weeks ago still looms. I've showed you exotic cobbles, migmatites, graded beds, flood debris, and boudins, now for some folds...

As with the others, these are images from the Maryland Piedmont, along the Billy Goat Trail in C&O Canal National Historical Park.

Here's two repeats that fall, Venn-diagram-like, into the overlap area between the "graded beds" theme and the "folds" theme:




Now for some fresh, never-before-seen images:







(that's a fold cut twice oblique to its axis, resulting in an elliptical outcrop pattern).

Tiny folds:


Folds in one direction (top to bottom); boudinage in the perpendicular direction (left to right):


Found this one on the side of a cliff I probably should not have been scaling:


That's all for now... have a good Tuesday!

Labels: igneous, maryland, metamorphism, national parks, piedmont, primary structures, structure

Yesterday, four Honors students and I went out to West Virginia's route 55 (between Wardensville and Moorefield), to look at some sedimentary strata and associated tectonic structures. Our guide was my friend David Dantzler, an enthusiastic amateur geologist. Here's a map of the terrain we traversed:



As you can see, this is part of the Valley & Ridge province, an area of the country defined by Paleozoic rocks that were folded and thrust-faulted during the Alleghenian phase of Appalachian mountain-building. Recently, a new road has been constructed traversing these valleys and ridges. It's a bit of a boondoggle, a pet project of West Virginia senator Robert Byrd which funneled federal dollars into the Mountain State, ostensibly to make it easier for the chicken farmers of Moorefield to get their birdie bits to market on the east coast.

This image ought to give you a sense of the project's scale (big bridge), and how much use it gets (no one on the bridge):


But the U.S. taxpayer's loss is the geologist's gain... There are some pretty spectacular new exposures of Valley & Ridge rocks along the new route 55. Here's the NOVA van parked at an outcrop of Tuscarora Sandstone that is arched up into a broad anticline. Again, notice how few people are driving on route 55 here:


Ooh, look: heavy traffic!


Contact between the lower Tuscarora Sandstone (a Silurian-aged extremely pure quartz sandstone, variably fused to quartzite), and the overlying (darker-colored) formation, which is either the Rose Hill Formation or the Mackenzie Formation at this location:


We found oodles of cool trace fossils:







But it wasn't just sedimentary layers. There were also some cool tectonic structures, like this joint in the Tuscarora, showing a beautifully developed hackle fringe:



Here's some "pencil cleavage" where fine-grained shale develops cleavage that intersects the planes of fissility, causing it to fracture in long slivers:



I slammed on the brakes for this one: an awesome anticline...


I forced David and the students to act out the orientation of the bedding planes at this anticline:


Honors student Jason points out a small thrust fault in the outcrop above him: You can see the offset in a greenish/gray shale layer:


In case it wasn't obvious above, here's a zoomed-in shot, with the offset layer highlighted (the miracles of Photoshop!) and the fault labeled:


We all had a grand day outside, and the rain held off until our return trip, which was pretty great. Thanks to David for showing us these rocks, and thanks to my students for being smart and inquisitive and into field trips.

Labels: appalachians, devonian, field trips, fossils, mountains, nova, politics, primary structures, sediment, silurian, structure, teaching, valley and ridge, west virginia

I mentioned seeing some cool stuff when I went hiking on the Billy Goat Trail last weekend.

One of the things that really caught my eye were multiple new exposures of graded bedding. These rocks began as deposits of sediment offshore from a volcanic island arc: they consist of turbidite deposits that were then squished and squeezed as that volcanic island arc collided with eastern North America during the closure of the Iapetus Ocean. As a result of this, they were metamorphosed and deformed. But in a few places, you can still see the relict graded beds that originated through the settling out of turbidity currents.

Here's some images:

I count four or five here:





A nice central fault zone displaced the central block downward:




This one is a little more subtle...


Here's one that's been turned upside down (by tectonics):


And there were also some folded examples:




A close-up of the hinge of this folded graded bed:


Pretty cool, eh? The only problem is these samples aren't on the Billy Goat Trail itself, which means I'll really never be able to show them to students except in photographs...

Labels: geology, maryland, metamorphism, national parks, piedmont, primary structures, sediment, structure

Yesterday I mentioned finding a new (to me) outcrop of the Martinsburg Formation's graded beds (turbidite sequences shed off the late-Ordovician Taconian Orogeny here on the east coast of North America). Today, I'd like to share a few images of where John Graves and I went next: up into the heart of the Massanutten Synclinorium, the Fort Valley. To remind you of the relationship between the Shenandoah and Fort Valleys, here's a Google Map I've posted before:



There, defining the ridges of Massanutten Mountain (and thereby separating the lower Shenandoah Valley from the upper Fort Valley) is the Massanutten Sandstone, a Silurian-aged quartz sandstone (in some places it's a quartz-pebble conglomerate) that is correlated to the Tuscarora Sandstone further west in the Appalachian Mountains' Valley & Ridge province.

The Massanutten can show some nice primary structures, including some of the oldest known terrestrial plant fossils (preserved as fragmentary carbon films) and cross-bedding like this:



With regard to the cross-bedding, note that this is "reverse" cross-bedding, which records shifts in current direction over time. At the bottom of the sample, the current was flowing from left to right, and at the middle and top of the sample, it was flowing in the opposite direction, right to left. This sample shows well the distinctive shape of cross-beds: they are tangential to the main bed at the bottom, but are often truncated on top, making them superb geopetal indicators. (They tell you whether your rock is right-side-up or up-side-down.)

I took John on a hike up the Veatch Gap trail, because I wanted to show him the awesome anticline in the Massanutten Sandstone that NOVA adjunct geology instructor Chris Khourey and I had found on a reconnaissance trip out there in May of last year. John and I took a "group shot" with the fold:



And here's John showing those Montanans that we do actually have some cool geology out on the east coast:



So, what's going on here? Well... the Valley & Ridge province of the mid-Atlantic region is defined by folded (and thrust-faulted) sedimentary strata. These folds were produced about 300 to 250 million years ago, during the Alleghenian phase of Appalachian mountain-building. The tectonic cause of this deformation is interpreted to be North America's collision with Africa, closing the Iapetus Ocean and completing the assembly of the supercontinent Pangea.

More locally, the Shenandoah Valley and Massanutten Mountain are structurally underlain by a great fold, the Massanutten Synclinorium. Synclinoria are different from mere synclines because they are more complicated: the overall synclinal shape is "decorated" with numerous smaller anticlines and synclines. It's a big trough-like shape, but wrinkles are "parasitic" on the main fold. So, even within the big "canoe" shape of the Massanutten Synclinorium, there are little bulges and wrinkles that go the opposite direction. This anticline is one of them.

At that point, having seen the anticline, we weighed whether to keep hiking or not.

We opted to press on... and I'm so glad we did. ... Twenty feet further down the trail, we saw another two anticlines!



At its base, this one had a small cave I could crawl into:



And: a short distance further we found a hiker's shelter with an apt name:



Ha! I love it.

More tomorrow, when I'll revisit the issue of plumose structure and hackle fringes.

Labels: appalachians, geology, mountains, msse, ordovician, primary structures, sediment, silurian, structure, valley and ridge, virginia

Yesterday, I mentioned what my MSSE advisor John Graves and I saw along the Billy Goat Trail on Saturday afternoon. Today, I'd like to share some images and insights from our Sunday field trip, out to the Shenandoah Valley and the Massanutten Synclinorium which underlies it.

I would like to thank Rick Diecchio of George Mason University for sharing some key outcrop knowledge with me. I've found that information about good outcrops can be very difficult to obtain unless you know somebody who knows. The information is primarily passed on through the oral tradition, rather than written in sufficient detail in peer-reviewed literature or in field guides (...or posted on geoblogs?).

Anyhow, back in December, on our drive down to the Blue Ridge / Valley & Ridge Symposium in Charlottesville, I told Rick I was organizing a new Massanutten Synclinorium field course. It's a place he's very familar with. He recommended a good outcrop to see the turbidite sequences of the Martinsburg Formation, a late Ordovician clastic unit made of debris shed off the rising Taconian Mountains to the east. Rick drew me a map in my field notebook, and on Sunday I was finally able to schedule a visit. Since John is unfamiliar with the stratigraphy and structure of the Shenandoah Valley (or the east coast in general), we also stopped at a lot of the other stops I'll be taking students to, including the classic "Tumbling Run" section.

Today I'd like to share a sets of photos with you from this new (to me) outcrop of the Martinsburg Formation. Tomorrow I will share another set from the next layer up in the stratigraphic stack, the Massanutten Sandstone. Both outcrops a pleasing combination of sedimentary stratification and structural geology.

Here's the Martinsburg Formation outcrop, just west of the Shenandoah River's North Fork:


This, like the "Pet Store Anticline" that I have previously blogged about, is an excellent place to look at bedding/cleavage relationships. The beds are dipping east, but the cleavage dips steeply to the west, implying the outcrop's position within a much larger (kilometers-wide) cleavage fan.

Here's a eye-catching outcrop that shows the beds weathered out differentially, while pervasively cut by ~vertical metamorphic cleavage:


More beds, of alternating sand and mud, steeply dipping in the Massanutten Synclinorium:

Note how the muddier portions show cleavage development better than the sandier strata.

More pervasively-cleaved muddy layers:


Here's one that confused me. In this predominantly-sandstone layer, you can see that the cleavage is better developed on the right, lower side of the bed. Does this mean that the right, lower-side of the bed is more mud-rich? (and sand-poor?) It did appear to be finer grained. If so, does this imply this bed is upside-down? Ordinarily, I would have thought to only look for the primary sedimentary structure as a geopetal (right-side-up) indicator, but this is the first time it has occurred to me that structural susceptibility based on mineralogy (in this case, susceptibility to cleavage development) could be used as an indicator of younging direction. I should note that this particular photo was taken downhill of the main outcrop, and may well be overturned. It's a synclinorium, after all, not a smooth syncline!


In this photo, the turbidite sequences of the Martinsburg Formation show a cool feature, a primary sedimentary structure known as cross-bedding:

Note that this photo is taken with the photo's long axis ~parallel to bedding, but the reality of the outcrop is that this is all steeply dipping, rotated 90 degrees clockwise (see the inset for "true" outcrop orientation).

...But wait! There's stuff dipping to the left, and stuff dipping to the right! Which one is this purported cross-bedding? Try this labelled version to sort it all out:

Note how at the bottom, the cross-beds curve tangentially to subparallelism with the main bed. They are truncated at top by the overlying layers. This is a good geopetal indicator, and the photo is oriented in depositional position, with the top at the top. Furthermore, if you reconstruct the current direction from these cross-beds (after the strata have been "unfolded" and restored to their original horizontal orientation, it would have come from the east... that is, from the orogen itself (the roots of which are exposed along the Billy Goat Trail.)

The intersection of rock weaknesses along the planes of bedding and planes of cleavage can result in the rock fracturing into long pencil-like bits, a phenomenon known as "pencil cleavage." This is my Freddy Krueger impersonation using the Martinsburg's cleaved "pencils."


John puts his hand up to give a sense of scale to the axis of this small fold in the steeply-dipping strata:


I was all agog over this outcrop, really digging the relationship between the structure and sedimentological elements in the rock. Best of all, it's a very short drive from Tumbling Run, and will replace the hike to the Buzzard Rock outcrop in my Massanutten field trip in April. (For NOVA-area readers, there are still four spaces open in that class...)

Labels: appalachians, mountains, msse, ordovician, primary structures, sediment, structure, valley and ridge

When critters interact with their environment, sometimes they leave behind traces of that interaction. If we're lucky, these traces fossilize and can be preserved through time to tell us interesting things about the past. This past summer, when I rafted down the Grand Canyon with my father and two brothers, I saw some cool trace fossils. In chronostratigraphic order (earliest first), here they are:

The Bright Angel Shale can be found atop the Tapeats Sandstone, and below the Muav Limestone along the river in much of the canyon. The Bright Angel is middle Cambrian in age. For my money, it's one of the most spectacular sedimentary layers there, because it's so varied. The colors of the individual strata range from purple to green to brown to tan, and they are in many places chock full of horizontally-oriented feeding traces. Here's some of those wormy shapes along the trail to a waterfall we hiked to... (sorry, don't remember the name or exact location... I think it was day 4 or so of the overall trip... Hmmm, I guess I should have blogged this in early July when I photographed it...)





Nearby, we saw a spectacular trilobite crawling trace (Cruziana?):



Earlier in the trip (day 1, at lunchtime), and higher in the stratigraphic stack (the Permian Coconino Sandstone, which is a sand dune deposit), we saw these reptile (synapsid?) footprints:



This is a trackway left by an ancient reptile as it was walking up and down the dunes, preserved on the slip-face (which defines the feature we recognize from a side-view as "cross bedding"), and now, 260 million years later, I'm viewing those same tracks from underneath, as the older slip-faces of the dune have peeled off, and only the overlying (younger) ones are preserved in this particular alcove. Pretty spectacular stuff. And it offers some nice lunchtime shade, too... Can't complain about that. Here's another shot, with a sense of scale in it:



You can see the individual toes! Wild!

Labels: arizona, cambrian, fossils, grand canyon, permian, primary structures, travel

Here's some silly sketches I made the other day...

Graded Bedding:


Cross Bedding:


Stromatolite:

Ripple Marks: (This one may be a bit obscure)


Normal Fault:


Reverse Fault:

Labels: art, geology, humor, primary structures

As I mentioned yesterday, the Virginia Department of Geology and Mineral Resources has an excellent rock garden outside their office in Charlottesville, displaying a diverse suite of large rock samples from across the state's five physiographic provinces.

Here's Rick Diecchio (George Mason University) providing a sense of scale for the rock garden:


Here's a few of the samples that caught my eye, with my shoe providing a sense of scale (size 12, specifically) in each image...

Aquia Formation sandstone with Turitella fossils (Paleocene); King George County:


Balls Bluff Siltstone with mudcracks (Triassic); Culpeper County:


Conococheague Formation collapse breccia (Cambrian); Augusta County:


Cranberry Gneiss (?) showing well-developed lineation (Mesoproterozoic); Grayson County:


Kyanite quartzite (probably Ordovician metamorphic age); Prince Edward County:


Fossil Sigillaria tree trunk from the Wise Formation (Pennsylvanian); Wise County:


Unakite, the state rock of Virginia according to some (Mesoproterozoic); Rockbridge County:


Here's a link to the PDF (1.82 MB) with all the details about all the rocks in the garden, an impressive achievement just like the symposium.

Labels: conferences, fossils, igneous, meetings, metamorphism, primary structures, sediment, virginia

What's the tallest mountain on Earth?

Everest, right? Well, yeah: if you're measuring from sea level. If you're measuring from the top of the crust the mountain rises from though, it's Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. It's about ~13,800 feet above sea level, but it rises ~33,500 feet from the oceanic crust to the peak (that's compared to Everest's mere ~29,000 feet from base to peak. So... you could say that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain on our planet... (you could!)

On Thanksgiving day, my friend Lily and I took a drive up to the top of Mauna Kea, and did a little hike up there at high elevation. Today, I'd like to share some photographs of that excursion. We saw some pretty cool geology.

On the drive up the mountain, we saw an animal which was apropos, considering the day:

Gobble, gobble, gobble. Watch out turkeys, we'll be back after we work up an appetite...

Here's Lily's jeep in the "saddle" between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, looking north (with Mauna Kea in the background and basaltic lava flows from Mauna Loa in the foreground):


Some cider cones (the Hawai'ian word for cinder cone is pu'u) in the saddle:


Turning the other way (looking south), you can see the bulky form of "the long mountain," Mauna Loa. What a classic shield volcano shape! I love the fact that it's so dang wide it makes a lousy photograph. You just can't capture its spread-out bulk in a photo; it's too massive:


This was the spot where I pretended to have my toes overrun by a pahoehoe flow:


As we drove up the road to the top of the mountain, I was amazed at the raw volcanic landscape, decorated with cinder cones like this one:


At one point, we passed a neat little angular unconformity on the roadside. Here it is, with a nickel (white dot left of center) for scale:


Here's a closer-shot of this small angular unconformity. Earlier layers of ash and lapilli were deposited at a steep angle, and then eroded (perhaps by glaciation? pure speculation there) before more ash and lapilli were deposited atop it, at a lower angle. There's not likely to be much time missing here, and so perhaps it's better to think of this as the top of a cross-bed, an advancing front of pyroclastic deposition moving down the mountainside, overrun by later eruptions, which may have scoured off the upper few inches (??? pure speculation) or so before deposition.

Really, the truncated tops of cross-beds are mini-angular-unconformities, when you think about it; just not with the same amount of time missing at a "real" angular unconformity (with millions of years missing) due to mountain building like the one at Siccar Point. (Video of cross-beds forming)

Here's something else which the clueless geologist might mistake for a sign of mountain building:
No, those aren't originally-horizontal strata that have later been folded. They're layers (again of ash and lapilli) deposited on the originally-rough topography of the mountainside, covering small ridges and filling small valleys. Where a given layer is exposed at higher elevation, I interpret to be a paleo-topographic high; where that same stratum is exposed at lower elevation, that's a paleo-topographic low. The roadcut reveals these layers have undulating shapes, but this is unlikely to be folding that results from tectonic compression: instead, I think it's showing us the lay of the ancient land surface.

Looking south, we could see past Mauna Loa to the actively erupting steam vent coming out of Halemaumau Crater at Kilauea Caldera (source of the vog!):


Near the summit of Mauna Kea, there are a bunch of astronomical observatories:






On the summit is where you find those examples I mentioned the other day of hawaiite, a rock of basaltic composition that is very dense (ostensibly due to erupting beneath the extra pressures of a Pleistocene ice cap):


Here's me on the summit:


View to the north from the summit: More cinder cones...


Here's a YouTube video of me pointing stuff out from the summit (Kilauea, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, observatories, hikers, etc.). Unfortunately the wind makes it all but unintelligable, but I filmed it, doggone it, so I'm going to post it:



I found a beautiful example of a volcanic bomb up there:


After the visit to the summit, we went for a hike to a small supposedly-glacially-gouged-out lake below the summit (Lake Waiau):


Here's a Google Map, showing the lake's location:


I was surprised to see a thick biofilm on the bottom of the lake:


Encrusting the pebbles and cobbles there, it reminded me of Nora Noffke's modern and Archean biofilm photos in the recent GSA Today, as well as my "Life in Extreme Environments" class this past summer at Montana State University.


We saw some nice examples of structural geology on this hike. Previously, I've mentioned plumose structure, a branching pattern on the topography of fracture surfaces in fine-grained rocks. We saw some of that on blocks of basalt atop Mauna Kea, as in this example (again a repeat photo, but the other day I showed it to you for the vesicle; today I'm showing it to you for the plumose structure.)


A similar feature are arrest lines, which again are minute variations in the surface of a fracture. Like plumose structure, which branches from a source point (where the fracture initiated) and branches out in the direction of propagation, arrest lines tell us about the development of a joint. Unlike plumose structure, though, they are not parallel to the propagating fracture front. Instead, they form perpendicular to it, and record how the fracture propagates in small "steps." Each of these arrest lines is interpreted as being a spot where the fracture grew a little bit, then stopped ("arrested") and then grew some more. In this case, the fracture face we're looking at started at the bottom of the picture and grew towards the top of the photo. You can even see some less-discernible plumose structure backing this up:

Similar arrest lines can be seen in basalt images here and here...

We also saw some pretty spectacular xenoliths. Here's one of gabbro in basalt:


Here's one of peridotite in basalt:


And a few more:



My boots, with another volcanic bomb:


Driving back down the mountain afterwards, we got this nice view of the cinder cones (pu'us!) in the eastern part of the "saddle" between Maunas Kea and Loa:


This Mauna Kea excursion was one of my favorite things that I did on my all-too-brief trip to Hawaii. It was great to get up in the high country, where the air is thin (and vog free!) and the skies are deep blue, and the geology is surprisingly varied (at least it was surprising to me, and pleasantly so). The hike let us work up a good appetite, so we headed back down the mountain and straight to Thanksgiving dinner!

Labels: basalt, birdies, geology, glacial landforms, hawaii, igneous, mountains, msse, primary structures, structure, travel, unconformities, volcano, xenoliths

Contrary to what you may have heard, it's not all basalt. Even the basalt is astonishingly varied: the extrusive rock of a thousand faces... Here I'll share some pictures I took of rocks in Hawai'i:

There's pahoehoe:


...and there's a'a:


Here's a pahoehoe flow oozing over my boot (just kidding; it was cold when I did this):


Pahoehoe lobes can drain out, leaving only the outer skin as rock, but with a hollow center. These are lava tubes (nickel for scale):


Another one (nickel for scale):


Cool texture on the inside of this lava tube (nickel for scale):

...and zooming in a bit closer (it looks like wrinkled cellophane!):


A stack of cross-sectioned pahoehoe flows, showing their tubular (totally tubular, dude) shape:


Some Hawai'i basalt is massive, like this cobble...


...or like this cobble of hawaiite, a dense form of basalt found atop Mauna Kea (where it apparently erupted beneath Pleistocene ice caps):


But the majority of Hawai'i's basalts are vesicular, meaning they contain "Swiss Cheese" type holes that result from gas bubbles. When the lava erupts, it experiences less pressure at the Earth's surface than it was subjected to at depth. As a result, many gases (steam, CO2, sulfur dioxide, chlorine, argon, others) exsolve from the lava solution and make bubbles. If these bubbles don't get a chance to pop before the lava sets up into igneous rock, then they are preserved as vesicles. Sometimes the vesicles are small:


...and sometimes they are big:


Sometimes, they are really big. Here's one I could fit my entire Nalgene water bottle into:


When vesicles later get filled in with mineral deposits, we call them amygdules. Here's some vesicles that have gotten a light coat of a white mineral on their interiors: the first step to converting a vesicle into an amygdule:


Some of the vesicles show strain (almost certainly due to late-stage flow in the increasingly-viscous lava, getting stretched out like air bubbles in pouring honey). Surface tension on the bubble wants to make it spherical, and the lower the lava's viscosity, the easier it will be to attain that perfect spherical shape, minimizing the surface-area-to-volume ratio. So when we find them in cigar-shapes or pancake-shapes instead, that's a clue that they've been deformed. Deformed not by tectonic forces (ductile flow at depth in an orogen), but ductile flow as a result of their formation, in a sluggishly oozing blob of lava:


Another example of stretched-out vesicles:


A lonely vesicle in an otherwise massive basalt:


Not sure what's going on here, but it looks cool (popped vesicles in sticky lava?):


Another thing you see a lot of in these Hawai'ian basalts are phenocrysts of certain minerals. Here, for instance, is a cobble showing nice olivine phenocrysts:


...and another:


Here's one I showed you last week when we discussed Green Sands Beach:


Here's an outcrop which shows phenocrysts of plagioclase feldspar instead:


And a river cobble (also vesicular) bearing a healthy population of feldspar phenocrysts:


Holy feldspar, Batman! This rock has a huge proportion of feldspars (you'll note that it's still vesicular, though: in spite of the overwhelming volume of macroscopic crystals, this is still an extrusive rock):


Here's something else caught up in a finer grained (and yes, vesicular) basaltic matrix: another piece of basalt!

This is a xenolith of slightly-older basalt showing flow banding in its own trains of vesicles, that after solidification got broken off and included in younger flows of basalt. I'll post some additional xenolith photos later this week.

It's not all basalt, though. Here's a breccia made of basaltic cobbles (penny for scale):


And a closer shot of the same outcrop (penny for scale):


Finally, a rock I was surprised to see: an intermediate-composition extrusive igneous rock called benmoreite (nickel for scale, and note the rock hammer impact marks):


Benmoreite is way more felsic that anything else on the island. According to my volcanic advisor Jess, it's the result of late-stage partial melting of basaltic source rocks in the island's oldest volcano, Kohala. In other words, it's a distillation of basalt: concentrating the most felsic components in this decidedly-lighter-complected rock (nickel for scale):

Labels: basalt, geology, hawaii, igneous, national parks, pleistocene, primary structures, volcano, xenoliths

...So let me ask you something, especially you sedimentary geologists...

This is a sample of the Martinsburg Formation, a clastic unit shed off the Taconian Orogeny and into the adjacent basin. It's exposed in the modern-day Shenandoah Valley, where it overlies Ordovician carbonates, and is overlain by the Silurian Massanutten Sandstone (which is correlative to the Tuscarora Formation). It's essentially a graywacke, showing rhythmic bedding traditionally interpreted as turbidite deposits. I collected this sample in the Shenandoah Valley a year and a half ago, on a camping trip with my family.

Then I put it on the NOVA rock saw and sliced it in half. This chunk went to my dad's back yard, where I ground it down and polished it up. The result is a decent look at the internal structure of the unit (you can click on it for higher resolution):


Note the pretty uniform weathering rind wrapping around the whole thing, like crust on a loaf of bread.

UPDATE: Woe is me; I forgot to include a sense of scale. The sample measures about 10 cm (~4 inches) on a side.

Here's the thing that gets me... While this portion ('upper' 2/3 of the sample) shows a clear fining-'upwards' sequence....


...this portion of the sample (lower 1/3) appears to show a coarsening-'upward' sequence:


In other words, in this 'graded bed,' the coarsest grains appear about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way 'up,' from 'bottom' to 'top'... What gives? This isn't part of the traditional Bouma sequence, is it? How does a bed like this form?

I'd appreciate any enlightenment you can offer.

Labels: primary structures, sediment, valley and ridge, weathering

Driving back from the GSW fall field trip this past weekend, I took this photo out of my car window. Considering the vehicle was in motion, I'm pleased with the decent quality of the photo:


This house clearly shows graded bedding! There are many ways to get graded bedding showing a fining-upwards sequence of deposition, but my favorite is deposition by turbidity currents, dense sediment-water flows that drop the heaviest stuff (usually the biggest particles) first. Then as the water calms, progressively finer and finer particles settle out of the turbid water.

I was predisposed to look for graded bedding in buildings, because one of my students/ colleagues/ friends, Dr. John Weidner, took this photo earlier in the year and shared it with me:

This would be a case of inverted graded bedding, a coarsening-upwards sequence. Did this house prograde out into a basin like a delta? Or was it deposited by a turbidity current and then later tectonically overturned?

Labels: humor, primary structures, sediment

Yesterday morning, I took a jaunt with a local amateur geologist, Owen P., to go look at some outcrops in streambeds in and adjacent to Silver Spring, Maryland.

Owen wanted me to look at these surfaces, our local unconformity between foliated metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont below, and unconsolidated sediments of the basal Coastal Plain above (cell phone for scale):
The lower rocks are metagraywacke schist of the Sykesville/Laurel Formation (different aspects of the same thing, as far as I am concerned, and not worthy of two different formation names). They were metamorphosed during the Taconian ("Taconic") Orogeny, ~460 million years ago. These rocks were then eroded, and new sediments deposited on top of that eroded surface -- this is an unconformity like the ones I posted about over the past couple of days out in Wyoming and Arizona.

My host thought the layer above the unconformity might be tsunami deposits associated with the Chesapeake Bay bolide impact at 35.5 million years ago. However, that's not what I saw. Instead, the high proportion of angular quartz, and the fact that it was clast-supported rather than matrix supported, suggested to me that the upper layer was a gravel deposit from this very stream. It was good for me to see such a collection of angular clasts atop the unconformity -- on hilltops in DC, I'm used to seeing the Potomac Formation in this position. It's a Cretaceous-aged river deposit, with a real mix of sand, clay, and well-rounded (mainly quartzite) cobbles.

Another look (with cell phone for scale):


After I explained why I didn't buy the tsunamite hypothesis, but encouraged him to keep looking, Owen took me to another cool location, on Northwest Branch (a creek) just outside the Beltway at Burnt Mills Park. Here's a location map:


There, we found an outcrop of migmatitic metagraywacke very reminiscent of the one I visited on Four Mile Run in Arlington, VA, in March of this year. Cutting down, Northwest Branch has exposed a complex of clearly metasedimentary, clearly granitic, and not-so-clearly transitional migmatitic rocks. It's pretty cool, and not only because some of the potholes went all the way through the rock, making wormhole tunnels that a geologist can (and will) crawl through...


I found a couple of cool igneous contacts. Here's a dike of granite cutting through metagraywacke. I like this outcrop because it shows that these things are in fact filled-in cracks, and cracks have a propagating edge, a tip. Most granite dike exposures don't show this fracture edge, but this one does. In spite of the graffiti, it's a good look at that process caught in the act.


And here's a nice example of cross-cutting relationships. Host metagraywacke (notice the pebble-sized clasts of various lithologies in the upper left) is cut by two granite dikes: first a finer-grained, darker-colored one, and then by a coarser-grained, lighter-colored one. Beauty!


Thanks to Owen for showing me these outcrops -- I appreciate the interest and the invitation!

Labels: granite, maryland, metamorphism, migmatite, primary structures, sediment

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the "Great Unconformity," today I offer a few more shots of unconformities in the Grand Canyon, including (at the end), an angular unconformity...

First, here's a close-up of the contact between the Vishnu Schist and the Tapeats Sandstone:


Slightly blown-out because I was shooting into the sun, and the outcrop was in shadow, but that's why God invented Photoshop:


Same thing, but with the direct light, it's texture (rather than color) that allows you to discern the difference between the two rock units:


The Great Unconformity is visible here, with a boatload of river rafters for scale:


Same thing:


Same thing again...


Okay, here's something different. A waterfall shot. People apparently love waterfalls. Every place I went this summer with a waterfall, there were oodles of folks gathered around, and much flapping of camera shutters. I must be dim, because I kind of don't get it. Water flows downhill... What's the big deal? Anyhow, here the waterfall actually shows us something interesting: note where it emerges from:

That's right -- from the unconformity. Apparently, this is due to the stubborn resistance of the crystalline basement rocks, which are tougher to erode into than the overlying sandstone. The creek cut through the sandstone, but hasn't yet cut through the Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite. However, the Colorado River has, and as the creek flows into the river, there's a difference in the elevation of the two bodies of water. Hence, the waterfall.

I went for a pretty amazing swim in the pool at the base of this fall: the water was cool and bracing, and the wind created by the waterfall was amazingly powerful, actually blowing swimmers downstream! Just the thing after a hot hike.

Lastly, a different aspect of the same unconformity, also seen in the Grand Canyon. Don't look in the foreground, but high up on the distant ridge. This one is an angular unconformity, with sedimentary rocks below the ancient erosional surface as well as above.

In this case, the angular unconformity separates the Grand Canyon Supergroup from the Tapeats. The Tapeats, as we've seen, is Cambrian (~543-488 million years old). The Grand Canyon Supergroup (1.25 billion to 825 million years old) was laid down on the basement rocks first, then faulted and tilted 15 degrees. These tilted blocks were then eroded. On many, the Grand Canyon Supergroup was totally burnished away, re-revealing the underlying basement rocks. In the more down-dropped blocks, however, little protected packages of the Supergroup were preserved. When sea level rose anew in the Cambrian, it deposited the Tapeats Sandstone. In some places, the Tapeats sand was laid down on granite and schist, and in other places on these tilted layers of the Grand Canyon Supergroup. Same erosional surface; different rocks below it in different locations.

Here's a Flash animation showing the various steps it took to put the Grand Canyon together, including the erosion that gave rise to these various unconformities.

Labels: cambrian, grand canyon, primary structures, proterozoic, sediment

This summer, I saw "the Great Unconformity" in a couple of locations.

An unconformity is a break in the local geologic record -- a period of time which elapsed without being recorded by the deposition of rock units. Often unconformities mark places where erosion has erased part of the local rock record, but sometimes they just mark periods of non-deposition. (Analogy: You can get a blank page in your diary two ways. You can either take a day off from writing, or you can write that day's entry and then later go back and erase it. Either way, you end up with a day going by and no journal entry.) People call the major break between metamorphic and igneous "basement" rocks and overlying sedimentary layers the "Great" Unconformity, though it's not the same age everywhere. It's just shorthand, really.

Anyhow, here it is in the Grand Canyon (photos provided below are both unadorned and annotated versions):





Give or take, there's about 1.2 billion years missing along this ancient erosional surface. Intuitively, this probably makes sense, since metamorphic rocks like schist and 'distilled' intrusive rocks like granite are characteristics of mountain belts, where they form at depth. In order to get those interior-mountain-belt rocks to the surface takes lots of erosion over lots of time (though not necessarily that long -- in DC, for instance, we have interior-mountain-belt rocks exposed that 'only' took 360 million years to make it to the surface). In the above photos, the metamorphic rocks and granites below the unconformity formed about 1.7 billion years ago, during the Mazatzal Orogeny, and the sedimentary layers on top (both quartz sandstones) were deposited in the Cambrian period, about 543-488 million years ago. They represent passive margin sedimentation along an ancient transgressive seashore, something like modern day beach sands along the east coast of North America. So, to get something like the Great Unconformity, take something like coastal Maine (Acadia National Park, say), and bury it beneath something like Virginia Beach.

And here "it" is again, in Wyoming's Wind River Canyon (between Thermopolis and Shoshoni):





A zoomed-in look at this same outcrop:





This time, however, the rocks below the unconformity are much older* metamorphics (schist & amphibolite) and granite. According to Maughan (1987), these are the oldest rocks exposed in Wyoming, having formed about 2.9 billion years ago. They were then metamorphosed at 2.75 billion years ago. These truely ancient rocks (Archean) were then eroded and exposed at the surface, where quartz-rich sand was laid down atop their burnished roots. Aside from the difference in the age of the underlying basement rocks, the story is very similar to the one at the Grand Canyon.

* Thanks very much to Kim, who pointed out my error in under-stating their age in an earlier, more-poorly-researched version of this post.

Reference:
Maughan, E.K. (1987) "Wind River Canyon, Wyoming." In: Geological Society of America Centennial Field Guide - Rocky Mountain Section. S.S. Buess, ed. p. 191196.

Labels: archean, cambrian, dc, grand canyon, primary structures, proterozoic, unconformities, wyoming

Today: I offer some photos I took in Boulder Canyon, Colorado, in June. These are all igneous rocks exposed in the Precambrian 'basement' rocks, brought to the surface by the Laramide Orogeny.

Directions: Drive to Boulder; go west up the main canyon into the Rocky Mountain Front Range.

Location map:


Granite pegmatite:


Contact! Granite pegmatite meets granodiorite:


Contact! Granite dike cutting across granodiorite (with one small mafic xenolith):


Contact! Mafic xenoliths afloat in granodiorite:


Put the previous two pictures together, and what do you get? My favorite outcrop of the whole excursion... Contact contact! A granite dike cutting across mafic-xenolith-bearing granodiorite. This would be a good practice photo for introductory level students to establish relative ages of the three different rocks shown:


Contact! More prosaic, but high-contrast... Granite meets basalt:


Epidote vein (Without any good reason, I love the color of epidote):


My Prius parked on the side of Boulder Canyon Drive:

Labels: basalt, colorado, granite, primary structures, prius, travel, xenoliths

Sorry for the long delay in posting here. Turns out they don't have Wi-Fi at Phantom Ranch.

After my time in Zion (did Angels Landing and a few other small hikes while there), I scooted down to Las Vegas, Nevada, to pick up my father and two brothers. They had flown in there, and after one day were already tired of the city. I was ready to leave five minutes after I got there, which is always how I feel about Vegas. Somehow, circumstances keep conspiring to bring me back there, though...

We drove out of the Basin & Range and up onto the Colorado Plateau, and spent the night at Cliff Dwellers, a lodge near Marble Canyon. I was really impressed with their food and drink. We had an amazing meal, washed down with several pitchers of Newcastle Brown Ale! In the morning, we gathered up our gear and put onto the river. Our trip consisted of two rafts outfitted with side tubes and motors and guides. One raft was entirely made up of a family from Charlotte, North Carolina, including the glass artist Wayland Cato, III. The Bentley's raft was augmented by a family from Littleton, Colorado, two oil men from Oklahoma, and a couple of veteran river rafters from northern California. It was a motley crew, but we started having fun immediately.

We launched at Lees Ferry, in the Kaibab Limestone, and then descended in both elevation and geologic time. At our first lunch stop, in the Coconino Formation, I was astonished at several synapsid reptile trackways protruding from the underside of the paleo-dune slipfaces overhead. I took some photos, but because of the aforementioned software issue, I won't be able to share them until I get back to DC in August. As the first couple of days went by, we just went deeper and deeper into the Paleozoic stratigraphy of the Colorado Plateau. Of all the formations, my favorite was the Bright Angel Shale, which has many beautiful colors in thin layers throughout (not to mention oodles of trace fossils). I was particularly pleased to play frisbee in a "cave" in the Redwall Limestone, a place that I have shown photographs of to my students, but never actually seen before. It's a HUGE cliff of the Redwall, and then this seemingly small cave etched into its base (and filled with sand), but the cave could easily swallow my building at NOVA: it's big!

At some point, we crossed a major fault, and were instantly dropped down about a billion years in geologic time. Once we got into the Grand Canyon Supergroup and the metamorphic and igneous basement rocks, my geologic interest really went wah-wah. The Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite make a stunning contrast: really beautiful pink cutting across dark grey. I introduced my raft-mates to the idea of the Mazatzal Orogeny, and we discussed how boudinage forms. There were faults and folds galore: structural paradise. I loved it.

Did I mention the rapids? There were rapids. The water was COLD, thanks to Glen Canyon Dam(n). But the sun was hot, and we dried out quickly. Meals were gourmet, though the campsites were spartan (you had to poop in a box that got packed onto the raft each morning: leave no trace!). We slept out under the stars every night, sometimes dealing with blowing sand.

We took several hikes up side canyons to see waterfalls and go swimming. Several of these were good and physically challenging, which is what I wanted. I enjoyed swimming and playing "three-dimensional frisbee" in Havasu Creek, and doing cannonball jumps in the weird blue of the Little Colorado River.

The final day on the river, we came to the western section of the Canyon where recent lava flows (basalt) have cascaded over the rim and down into the canyon. This is famous for producing one of the toughest rapids in the whole Grand Canyon: Lava Falls. But it was awesome to float by and see umpteen gazillion columnar joints, and whole feeder canyons plugged up by basalt. Pretty cool!

Our final morning, we were helicoptered out of the Canyon to a ranch on the rim. This was my first time in a helicopter, and it was giddy and amazing. I want to fly! From the ranch, we transferred to small fixed-wing planes, and I said goodbye to my family. They went back to Vegas, and I flew back to Cliff Dwellers, where my Prius (and a shower!) awaited.

Labels: fossils, geology, grand canyon, minerals, primary structures, rivers, sediment, travel, volcano

On Saturday, I took a group of NOVA summer school students to Shenandoah National Park to look at some rocks. We had great weather, and saw evidence of Grenvillian mountain building, the breakup of Rodinia, and the transgression of the Sauk Sea. A real crowd-pleaser was an outcrop of what was once columnar basalt (the Catoctin Formation). I say "was once" because the basalt has been metamorphosed to greenstone, and the columns have been squashed into more lathe-like shapes.

Here's a few photos of the columns:

All four photos by Nicole LaDue (NSF). Thanks Nicole!

Labels: blue ridge, field trips, primary structures, shenandoah, teaching

In December of 2005, I went out to The Sea Ranch, California, for Christmas. (The Sea Ranch is one of those towns that is officially called "The" something, kinda like The Plains, Virginia. Sorta weird, but there it is.) I want to share an experience I had there, because it gave me an important perspective on my own 'native' geology back in the mid-Atlantic region. It was a significant moment of understanding for me. Let me walk you through it...

The following collection of images are what I saw walking a mere 1 mile up and down the coast from the house where we were staying. I hope you will be struck by the incredible diversity of rock types seen here (as I was):

Conglomerate:




Siltstone and shale interbedded (vertical bedding):


Siltstone and shale interbedded (anticline):


Siltstone and shale interbedded (syncline):


Mudchip conglomerate (mud chips are "rip-up" clasts due to scouring of a muddy location by a sudden intense current, which carries much larger particles like the sand that now surrounds the darker, finer-grained mud chips):


Quartz-rich sandstone:


Graywacke (showing mouthwateringly beautiful graded bedding):


A zoomed-out shot of that graded bed:


Various sedimentary layers (sandstone, silstones, shale partings):


And a close-up of a few small faults that cut through them:


And it's not just sedimentary rocks. Here's some greenstone (metamorphosed basalt). Note the cluster of amygdules (infilled vesicles) in the center:


The greenstone is green due to a lot of chlorite, but it also shows some nice epidote:




Looking north up the coast from our rental house, you could see greenstone and conglomerate intermingled on the 10m-scale:


This is in the small cove directly in front of our rental. There are three different rock units seen here (greenstone, conglomerate, clayey sand), all indicating different things. Note the big clast of greenstone "hovering" in the clayey sand part:




So after taking a walk along the lovely coast there, and seeing all this stuff, I thought "Wow."

The tremendous diversity of rock types along this section of the Sonoma County coast was due to tectonic shuffling of rock types at a subduction zone. In the Mesozoic, this part of California was at a trench where the Farallon Plate was being subducted to the east underneath North America. Melting at depth produced magma, which resulted in the Sierra Nevada continental volcanic arc (excellently reviewed by Geotripper in his "Under the Volcano" series examining the Sierras). But at the trench itself, all the sediments at the edge of North America were being compressed and squeezed and mixed up with the sediments being scraped off the subducted oceanic slab. Some knobs and bumps of basalt even got scraped off the Farallon Plate and added into this jumbled mess. Altogether, this big pile of debris from the convergent boundary is referred to as an accretionary wedge. "Accretionary" because it got accreted, or added, onto the western edge of North America. "Wedge" because that's its overall shape in cross-section.

When subduction ceased (due to the subduction of the East Pacific Rise), the Farallon Plate was gone at this latitude, and the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate were now in direct contact for the first time. As time went by, the accretionary wedge reacted to now longer being dragged downward, and it began to isostatically rebound. It bobbed upward, and brought its 'melange' (French for mixture) to the surface. The uplifted accretionary wedge is the California Coast Ranges, a fantastic place for varied geology mainly because of the tectonic "shuffling" that happened here during the Mesozoic.

So, I mentioned that seeing all this diversity in so short a hike really impressed me. But the insight it gave me is that the same thing happened on the east coast. Where I live and work, in DC and Virginia, an accretionary wedge developed during the early Paleozoic, just like in California, with the exception that ours got subsequently squeezed and metamorphosed in a series of mountain-building events. It's a bit more difficult to recognize, partially due to that metamorphism and partially due to all the @#$%ing vegetation obscuring the underlying bedrock. But it's there: we have metagraywacke, with relict graded beds, metabasalt, quartzite, schist ("meta-shale") and metaconglomerate: it's everything I saw in California with a metamorphic overprinting!

"Wow," I thought again.

Here's some shots of DC-area rocks that are analogues for the ones I've already showed you in California:

Metamorphosed mud-chip conglomerate (near Chain Bridge, DC):


Metamorphosed quartz-rich sandstone (the Sugarloaf Mountain quartzite, MD):




Metagraywacke showing metamorphic chlorite, garnet, and pyrite (both from DC):




Graded bed preserved in metagraywacke (Billy Goat Trail, MD):


Metabasalt (amphibolite, again from the Billy Goat Trail, MD):


Metaconglomerate (Klingle Road, DC):




The experience comparing the two coasts greatly enriched my understanding of tectonics and subduction, and gave me perspective on DC's geologic history. Two different accretionary wedges, two coasts, two eras... but one underlying process. That's what really hit home. Geology repeats itself. It gave me a renewed interest in my local geology. Everyone always hears about what great geology California has (and it does), but doggone it, DC pulled that same trick millions of years earlier, and experienced a series of orogenies immediately afterwards (which California can't claim!).

If it's true that "the best geologist is the one who has seen the most geology," then I became a better geologist that day on the Sonoma coast.

PS - I think it's funny to note that I didn't put a sense of scale in any of the California pictures, but that most of the DC area pictures do have one. I think that says something about my development as a geologist and educator too...

Labels: basalt, plate tectonics, primary structures, sediment, structure

Today, some shots from my time in Yellowstone National Park last summer. Here's Mammoth Hot Springs:

Close-up of the travertine deposits at Mammoth:

Me advertising my brother's company at Mammoth:

Norris Geyser Basin, slime:

Norris Geyser Basin's loneliest tree:

More slime, this time two colors:

Nasty patch of slime. Looks like snot:

Bison herd:

Columnar jointing in basalt:

Me showing you where the columnar jointing is. (I'm pointing at it...)

Strata exposed in the Tower area:

And here they are again, labelled:

Lastly, heading north out of Yellowstone back to I-90 and Bozeman, here's a weathered-out Eocene dike in the Paradise Valley. The dike is more resistant to weathering than the rock it cuts through, so it stands up as a "wall"-looking feature.

Labels: basalt, field trips, hot springs, limestone, montana, primary structures, stratigraphy, travel, yellowstone

Here's a few more photos from the recent field trip to the Massanutten Synclinorium in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.

Some more Arthrophycus (?) trace fossils in the Massanutten Formation:

Outcrop of the Massanutten Formation on Route 678, south of Waterlick, VA. Note that the bedding is dipping to the south (reflecting the overall "canoe"-shape to the structure of the Massanutten Synclinorium... this is the "bow" of the canoe...):

Shelly horizon in the Mahantango Formation. Mainly brachiopod debris, but also crinoid columnals:

Cross-bedding in the Martinsburg Formation's Bouma sequences. This is a sample I collected on Saturday. I sawed it open on Monday, then polished it and gave it a coat of clear acrylic. Sample length is about 5 cm:

Ditto. As above, we can see clear cross-bedding here, reflecting current flow in these ancient turbidites:

Bedding / cleavage relationships expressed at an instructive outcrop in the parking lot of a pet store north of Front Royal, Virginia. Bedding is clearly visible running subhorizontally across the picture, but the rock breaks vertically: a tectonically-induced cleavage:

You could hardly ask for a better outcrop to teach bedding / cleavage relationships. Here's a medium-sized anticline in the same outcrop (note quarter, center, for scale). It clearly displays a fan of cleavage orientations. Lovely!

Lastly, on that same note, here's a sample I collected fromthat locality, with bedding planes and cleavage planes highlighted through the magic of CorelDraw. The stripes you see on the face of the sample are formed by the intersection of bedding and cleavage planes, shown schematically in red:

Labels: appalachians, field trips, fossils, primary structures, valley and ridge, virginia

Last week, I mentioned some cool conglomerates I saw when NOVA adjunct instructor Chris Khourey and I did some field scouting. The main purpose of that trip was not to focus on the Culpeper Basin's boundary conglomerates, however, but the "Great Valley" of Virginia's Valley and Ridge province. The "Great Valley" is usually called the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, because the Shenandoah River flows north through it. (Topographically, it continues north into Maryland, but the Shenandoah River isn't found there.) Sitting in the middle of the valley is a mountain range, Massanutten Mountain. And in the middle of Massanutten, there is another valley, the Fort Valley. As you can see below, Massanutten is a fence-like ridge separating the higher Fort Valley from the lower Shenandoah Valley:

In fact, rumor has it that the name "Massanutten" is a native American term for "basket." This describes the overall shape of the mountain/valley quite well. It probably won't surprise you to learn that this valley-in-a-mountain-in-a-valley pattern is due to differential weathering of folded sedimentary layers. In fact, the entire Great Valley is one big downturned fold, a syncline. Actually, it's not a perfectly smooth fold -- there are some wrinkles and minor folds within the overall down-turned structure, so we call it a synclinorium. The oldest rocks are therefore at the eastern and western edges of the Great Valley, and the youngest rocks are at the center of the Massanutten Synclinorium, up in the Fort Valley. It turns out that some of these rock layers are easily eroded, and some are tough. Of particular note is the Massanutten Sandstone, a quartz-rich, well-indurated rock that is responsible for the ridges of Massanutten Mountain. It weathers away more slowly than the shales and carbonates (limestones) above and below it. Here's a cross-section view to show how the subterranean structure influences the surface topography:

The map view up above (using Google Maps' super-cool new terrain feature) and this cross-section also show the difference in landscape texture (and geologic cause) of the Blue Ridge province in the SE corner of the images.

In discussing the geology of the area, I'm going to mix my pictures from Thursday's scouting expedition with photos from Saturday's actual field trip with my Audubon class.

Let's start at the beginning. The first stop was in the Conococheague Formation, a late Cambrian limestone. Our field trip stopped at a nice exposure near Mulberry Run, west of Strasburg, VA. Here's the crew looking close at the outcrop, and trying out their geo-interpretive field skills for the first time:

Albert tests the outcrop with some dilute hydrochloric acid. It fizzes!

Soon, we spot the first of several stromatolites:

There are also some nice spherical grains of calcite called ooids (or ooliths). These form in wave-influenced carbonate banks today, like the Bahamas.

Interpretation of this environment then? Looks like a nice passive margin, far from any major terrigenous inputs (i.e. mud or sand). Warm tropical temperatures leading to the chemical precipitation of lime mud from seawater.

What comes next? On to stop #2, the Tumbling Run section* south of Strasburg, we see a nice long exposure of the New Market, Lincolnshire, and Edinburg Formations, a series of Ordovician limestones, all dipping nicely towards the axis of the synclinorium. (Last semester, one of my Honors students looked at silicified trilobites in the Edinburg Formation.) As you walk downhill (and up-section), you see a change in the limestones. They get darker in color, and they start splitting into thin sheets along clay-rich layers. Uh-oh, we're getting an increasing clastic influence on these sedimentary rocks. They no longer record pristine, Bahamas-type environments. Now the limestone is mixing with shale. Where is all that mud coming from? A hint may be found in several bentonite layers, weathered volcanic ash deposits. There's some volcanoes getting closer to the area, it looks like.

In the late Ordovician, the east coast of North America experienced the first of three episodes of Appalchian mountain-building. Geologists infer that the Taconian Orogeny was caused by the collision of a volcanic island arc (like modern day Indonesia) with the east coast. The Tumbling Run section shows well the increasing clastic influence of the growing Taconian Mountains to the east.

It's also good for some small but interesting tectonic structures. Check out this conjugate pair of en echelon tension gash arrays:

The black nodules you see along bedding in the above image are flint nodules, very characteristic of the Lincolnshire Formation. If you get close to them, you'll find that they exhibit different mechanical properties than the limestone that surrounds them. They are more likely to break (brittle behavior) than flow (ductile behavior):

But let's get back to the stratigraphy, shall we? (It just doesn't do to get distracted by these minor structures!) Our next stop was to look at the Oranda Formation (calcareous shale), indicating heavy clastic influence (but still a bit of carbonate). Then, after a lovely lunch at the Strasburg Emporium, we headed off to the Buzzard Rock Trail, to look at the Martinsburg Formation. The Martinsburg is a nice thick batch of fine sand and mud interpreted as turbidite deposits. Various pieces of the Bouma sequence can be seen throughout the formation, including graded beds, ripple marks, and cross-bedding. This picture conveys these alternating lithologies, representing fluctuating current strength as turbidity currents periodically brought coarser sediment into the deep (low-oxygen, as indicated by the dark color) basin.

Now, keep in mind that all these sedimentary layers later got folded during the final phase of Appalachian mountain-building, the Alleghenian ("Alleghany") Orogeny. At that same time of intense deformation, some of these mud layers began to convert to slate. The outcrop on the Buzzard Rock Trail shows this pretty well, in spite of being covered by lichen, algae, moss, and other horrible rock-obscuring growths:

The sandy layers outcrop as stiff, blocky strata. But look to the right of the quarter: in the muddy layers, a penetrative cleavage has developed, subperpendicular to the compressive stress. Here, let me draw for you what I saw at this outcrop:

The clay minerals in the mud are more susceptible to being alligned by tectonic forces than the grains of sand in the coarser layers. So the shaley intervals exhibit a more pronounced cleavage than do the sandy intervals.

But again, I'm getting distracted by the tectonic overprinting! This trip is supposed to be about stratigraphy, pure and simple. Doggone it! Okay, moral of the Martinsburg: no more carbonate by the late Ordovician. Instead, this sedimentary basin is getting filled with clastic debris shed off the Taconian Mountains** to the east.

Next layer up is the Massanutten Formation: mainly quartz sandstone, but also some quartz pebble conglomerate. We see it by entering the "basket" via a water gap near Waterlick, VA. Driving south (uphill) along Passage Creek, we were soon surrounded by looming cliffs of quartzite. It represents fluvial and beach facies as the depositional basin was filled to the brim. Here's a boulder of the conglomeratic portion:

Here's some nice cross-beds in the sandy portion exposed near Blue Hole, about 4 miles south of Waterlick, VA:

Other Massanutten Formation features include some fossils. Here's some poorly-preserved brachiopod external molds:

And here's some Arthophycus horizontal trace fossils, probably made by polycheate worms:

Okay, I can't resist this tectonic structure: an awesome anticline exposed along the Veatch Gap Trail (eastern part of the synclinorium, where a small anticline in the Massanutten Formation is superimposed on the larger synclinal pattern):

Beyond the Massanutten Formation, we are in the Fort Valley proper, inside the "canoe" shape of the Massanutten Mountain ridge system. Next layer up is some upper Silurian / lower Devonian carbonates, representing a return to passive margin sedimentation after the end of the Taconian Orogeny and the erosional beveling of those ancient mountains. Unfortunately, there are no good places to stop on the narrow Fort Valley Road, so I don't have a picture of them to share. Trust me, though: they're there.

The next good stops are of Devonian shales. There's some nice ones exposed across the road from Elizabeth Furnace. More mud? From whence does it come? We interpret this again as the onset of an orogeny, in this case the Devonian-aged Acadian Orogeny, which dumped a big thick wedge of sediment into the Appalachian Basin. Here's a shot of the Needmore Formation, one of these shales with distinctive trace fossils highlighted by iron oxide:

The overlying Mahantango Formation (Devonian) is a siltstone that bears a decent number of body fossils, like these brachiopods:

Here's something that may be the back of a trilobite (if I'm not imagining the lobe to the left of the central line of knobs), or maybe a crinoid (if the "central" line is all there is):

Here's what appears to be the (vertically-oriented) trace fossil Daedalus, which I learned for the first time this spring in Silurian rocks near Buffalo, New York:

Finally, at the top of the stack, near Seven Fountains, there are exposures of more bentonite, in this case the Tioga Bentontite, a major stratigraphic marker bed throughout the Appalachians. Here's a shot of the bentonite exposure on the Fort Valley Road near Seven Fountains:

Here's Chris looking at the outcrop:

To summarize the Fort Valley portion of the story: after the Taconian Orogeny ends, we get a brief period of tectonic calm and passive margin sedimentation (carbonate), and then a return to orogenically-induced clastic sedimentation (augmented with volcanic eruptions). In the sedimentary sequence of the Massanutten Synclinorium, this records the onset of the Acadian Orogeny. The actual deformation of all these sedimentary horizons into a synclinorium shape was accomplished by the Alleghenian Orogeny: the much bigger mountian-building episode triggered with Africa and North America collided in the latest Paleozoic.

Hope you enjoyed joining us on this trip. Virginia's got some great geology, eh?

* For the Tumbling Run section, I highly recommend this excellent field guide:

Fichter, Lynn S., and Diecchio, Richard J., 1986, "The Taconic sequence in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Virginia." In: Geological Society of American Centennial Field Guide - Southeastern Section, p.73-78.

** Note I don't say "Taconic." The Taconic Mountains are a modern topographic feature in New York. They exhibit Taconian rocks well, and the orogeny is named for them, but the Ordovician Taconian Mountains would have been much bigger and more areally extensive.

Labels: fossils, primary structures, sediment, stratigraphy, structure, teaching, valley and ridge

This weekend, I took a backpacking trip in Shenandoah National Park. Thought I would share a few photos today: scenery first, geology second...

Here's the view looking east from Skyline Drive:


The temperature difference due to elevation was striking. It was still early spring up on the top of the mountains, on Skyline Drive:


...But down below, it was green and lush (and sodden with pollen!):


I camped out for two nights near Corbin Cabin, and did a day-hike around Thorofare Mountain on Saturday, visiting this waterfall at lunchtime:


The geology of Shenandoah National Park is interesting: it records the assembly of the early supercontinent Rodinia at about a billion years ago, and then the breakup of Rodinia about 600 million years ago. The first event recorded is the generation of granite gneisses and granites due to the Grenville Orogeny. The oldest unit in the park is the 1.1 Ga Pedlar Formation, a granite gneiss. There's a slightly younger granite which intrudes it called the Old Rag Granite (~1.0 Ga), but I didn't see any outcrops (or float blocks) of it, so I'll not mention it further. There's a thin, patchy sedimentary cover called the Swift Run Formation deposited directly atop the granite gneiss and granite, providing a nonconformity surface. Atop that is a series of volumnious tholeiitic basalt flows: these mafic extrusions record the breakup of Rodinia and the opening of a new ocean basin: the Iapetus. In many places in the park, you can see "feeder dikes" of the Catoctin cutting through the older plutonic and metaplutonic rocks (see image below). There are also some sedimentary rocks layered atop the Catoctin (the Chilhowee Group), recording the transgression of the Sauk Sea on the North American platform. But I didn't encounter any good outcrops (or float blocks) of them on this trip, so I'll stick to the tectonic story: the Pedlar Formation shows us Rodinia getting put together, and the Catoctin Formation shows us Rodinia breaking apart. Later metamorphism due to Appalachian mountain-building resulted in changes in both of these rocks (development of "blue quartz" in the Pedlar, and the Catoctin metamorphosed to greenstone).

Here's a massive dike (possibly a "feeder dike" feeding surface lava flows) of the Catoctin basalt cutting through the Pedlar Formation granite gneiss, just north of the Marys Rock Tunnel. Note the columnar jointing extending perpendicular to the walls of the dike:


Having covered all that, I now propose to spend the rest of this blog post showing you the variety of cobbles and boulders in my campsite. I camped at the little wedge of land above the confluence of two streams. One stream's catchment basin was Catoctin, and the other drained outcrops of Pedlar. As a result, the "float" in my camp was all either Pedlar Formation or Catoctin Formation. I'll just run through them one after another so you get a sense of the range of variety in each formation.

You'll notice that the Pedlar is sometimes coarse, sometimes fine, sometimes well foliated, sometimes not so much. You'll also notice that the Catoctin varies a lot in terms of its extrusive texture: sometimes aphanitic (fine-grained), sometimes amygdular (formerly vesicular), sometimes it even runs to volcanic breccia. All of these original lithologies have been metamorphosed to various degrees in the Catoctin, which here can be seen by comparing the amount of green in the rock. This green comes from two metamorphic minerals: chlorite and epidote. Enjoy!

Pedlar Formation:



















Catoctin Formation:

Labels: appalachians, basalt, blue ridge, granite, iapetus, metamorphism, national parks, primary structures, proterozoic, shenandoah, virginia

Ahhhh.... the semester's just about over. Yesterday, I gave my last lecture and delivered two lab practical exams, and now all that's left to do is give the final exams on Tuesday. Not a moment too soon! It's been a very busy time over the past couple of months. What with my regular teaching duties, my Audubon class, my online MSSE class, GSW, various talks (like Wednesday's "Geology along the C&O Canal" at NSF), supervising homeschoolers visiting the NOVA chemistry lab, grant finagling, writing projects, and just life, I'm dog tired. I'm seriously ready for a nice break.

This ought to mean I'll have more time for posting on this blog, and hopefully that the posts will be richer and more thoughtfully composed.

Anyhow, let's share some pictures today. These are photos I took last summer on Dave Lageson's "Geology of Glacier National Park and Surrounding Areas" course at Montana State University - Bozeman. Dave is a great field trip leader, and I'm looking forward to another of his courses this summer: "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology."

For the Glacier course, we loaded up the vans in Bozeman and drove northwest through Helena and up to Sun River Canyon, one of the best areas in the world to look at multiple imbricated thrust sheets. Dave's been taking students here for a long time, and in fact "wrote the book" on it as a field trip location. In the photo below, the prominent cliff is Paleozoic limestone. The gently-sloping hill in the foreground, however, is Cretaceous shale. As is often the case, tectonics trumps superposition. Compressional tectonic forces have shoved the older rocks up on top of the younger rocks. (An analogous situation in the east is the Blue Ridge's Grenvillian rocks thrust up and to the west over Cambrian and Ordovician carbonates of the Shenandoah Valley.)


Here's a map showing how the Canyon trends east-west across the north-south strike of these mutliple thrust sheets:

Next up: Waterton Lakes Park, Alberta. We slipped over the border and spent an evening drinking beer in the southernmost of the Canadian Rockies. ...Purty.


Here's us looking at the next day's field stops.


Still life with fun stuff:


The next day, crossing back into the U.S., we stopped to get a good look at Chief Mountain, another scene of thrusting older rocks on top of younger rocks. Again, the lower unit is Cretaceous, but this time the upper rocks are older, much older. They're Mesoproterozoic rocks of the Belt Supergroup, thrust eastward along the Lewis Thrust, which underlies the base of this mountain. Chief Mountain is an erosional remnant of the Lewis Thrust sheet: that is to say, erosion has cut into the thrust sheet and left behind this one isolated outpost of what was once a continuous sheet of allochthonous rock. (It's a klippe!) The thrust sheet picks up again in the mountains of Glacier National Park.


Next day: a hike up to Grinnell Glacier, a classic glacier in a park named for classic glaciers. Like all of Glacier's glaciers, however, Grinnell is melting. It's receded quite a lot, as repeat photography shows:


Here's a view looking down the Grinnell Valley at a string of pater noster lakes blue with "glacial flour."


Here's what's left of Grinnell Glacier:


Where the glacier once stood, there's now a new lake. Several of my classmates decided that they would go for a dip. Note: all these guys are from Montana...


As for myself, I stayed out of the water, amusing myself with the amazing sedimentary structures displayed by the Belt rocks. Here's an outcrop of the Grinnell Formation, showing amazing Mesoproterozoic mudcracks. (As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was...")


Glacier's Belt Supergroup rocks are reknowned for their stromatolites, fossilized cyanobacterial mats. Here, a stromatolitic layer in the Helena Formation was exposed in cross-section by glacial erosion. Penny for scale (atop middle stromatolite).


And here's another view of the same stromatolitic layer, exposed in map-view section (a horizontal slice, as opposed to the vertical outcrop above). Enthusiastic geologist for scale, imagining doing the backstroke through the Proterozoic Belt Sea.


And... that's it for today. I'm off to the Blue Ridge this weekend, so I won't be posting again until Monday or so. But hopefully I'll have some cool new images from Virginia's oldest rocks to share at that time. Be good.

Labels: canada, montana, msse, primary structures, proterozoic, structure

A few more photos from the Buffalo trip last week... All of these were taken by Victoria, my Honors student.

Here's some malachite in the sandstone of the Whirlpool Formation: the field trip leader suggested this was due to brine flow through these rocks during the Alleghanian ("Alleghenian") Orogeny:

Herringbone structure ("reverse cross bedding") in the Gasport Formation, overlying the DeCew Formation, which appears flat-lying and calm in this photo, but just below this shows disrupted bedding suggestive of seismic activity:

I showcase a sample too big to lug back to the van (ripple marks):

Watch where you stand! In the Niagara Gorge, we see some evidence that the Gorge is widening through mass wasting processes. Here's a small gap / scarp opening up as a block of rock to the right slumps down into the Gorge:

Lastly, on the trip home, we had an obligatory getting-stuck-in-the-mud moment:

Eventually, we got unstuck and headed back down the road!

Labels: geologists, mass wasting, meetings, nova, primary structures, sediment, teaching, travel

On Wednesday, two students and I participated in an excellent field trip examining the sequence stratigraphy of the Niagara region. We saw uppermost Ordovician rocks (the Queenston Formation) and then a dozen Silurian formations, some of them only 3 meters thick, stacked atop on another in a stereotypical layer cake fashion.

The trip was led by Carl Brett, who did a great job. I wanted to showcase here a few of the photos I took that day. Here's Carl showing us Arthophycus trace fossils (interpreted to be the burrows of polycheate worms):

At Outwater Park, we found fossil stromatoporoid reefs. Stromatoporoids were primitive, layered sponges. These ones show glacial striations across their surface, a result of the outcrop being scraped by glaciers during the recent Ice Ages:

At another stop (on Lockport Junction Road) , there was a Leperditia ostracode-rich layer. Ostracodes are small arthopods, kind of like krill, but with bean-shaped shells.

At Pekin Hill, we looked at the Goat Island Formation, which showed ripped-up stromatoporoids deposited within it.

Here's a stromatoporoid that tumbled loose from the slope. I'm bringing this one back to Annandale to use as a teaching specimen. Note the upward-bulging dome of the stromatoporoid's internal layers.

One of our most amazing stops was hiking up into the Niagara Gorge. This is at the downstream end of the Niagara Escarpment, where the Falls once were. The adjacent town is Lewiston.

Here's Laura and Victoria in the Gorge, overlooking the Niagara River:

Now for some fossils from the Rochester Shale and other units exposed in the Gorge. Carl brought these out to show us what we might find. Here's a mouthwatering slab showing Dalmanites trilobites:

And a golf-ball sized cystoid (relative of crinoids, blastoids, and other echinoderms):

He had some Lingula dwelling traces, too. Lingula is a common inarticulate brachiopod that dwells / dwelled in vertical burrows beneath the seafloor mud:

Here's a shot of a crinoidal grainstone. This limestone is almost entirely made up of "sand" generated by broken up crinoid skeletons:

Some spectacular trace fossils (ichno-genus unknown) on a slab that was catching the rays of the sun just right:

And a close-up of the same slab:

And lastly, a nice slab showing tool marks:

It was really a great trip -- perfect weather, fascinating rocks, good company, and I felt nice and tired at the end of the day.

Labels: fossils, meetings, new york, nova, primary structures, sediment, silurian

On Tuesday afternoon, four students and I drove from Annandale, VA, up to Buffalo, NY, for the NE section meeting of the Geological Society of America. On the way, we crossed the Pennsylvanian Appalachians, and pulled over to examine some beautiful redbed exposures on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I think these are in the Hampshire Formation, but I could easily be wrong about that, considering I've never been here before. Here's a few photos. First, some beautifully rhythmic alternations between sand and mud, now preserved as alternating layers of sandstone and mudstone:

Then, some nice "ball and pillow" structures, as heavy sand sank downward into squishy mud. In places, the mud skooshes upward in "flames":

And lastly and most amazingly (for me), some awesome exposures of flute casts. These are erosional scours into a layer of sediment by a current, which then fills in the scours (called "flutes") with sand, making these flute casts on the underside of the overlying layer of sand:

The flutes "point" upstream, and open up (and shallow) in the downstream direction. More later!

Labels: appalachians, meetings, nova, pennsylvania, primary structures, sediment, teaching

On one of my field trips last week, I collected this cobble of sandstone (penny for scale):

And here's the other side:

There's a delicate but telling geopetal indicator here in this sandstone: it shows us which way these sandstone layers were oriented in space when they were deposited as loose sand. Geopetal indicators give us "paleo-up," sometimes called the "younging direction." Classic examples include graded bedding, cross-bedding, and mudcracks. Here, it's a bit more subtle: small erosional "divots" in the layers of sand. These "divots" may be caused by something pushing down into the sand (the trace of an organism's trail), or may be caused by small amounts of scouring erosion. We only get to see them in two dimensions, so it's unknown whether they are simple pinpoints in three dimensions, or linear features -- perhaps even branching linear features. Reviewing the cobble's many layers, I've found three types of "divots":

Type 1 is a simple deflection of the the dark layers. It is more likely that the layer is deflected downward, but there is no guarantee: it could be a little lump of sand poking up from the bottom, too. In other words, Type 1 is not a completely compelling clue for paleo-up. Type 2 is more convincing as a geopetal indicator: here a lower layer or two has been actively scoured, and then an upper layer is draped over the scoured-out hole. Type 3 can also be seen though, and it's a weird one: I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why two successive beds would both have a "divot" in the same location. Is this a squishing downward effect? For instance, were I to go stand on my bed, my weight would push downward on my comforter, but also the sheets underneath. They would both deflect from the bed's horizontal surface in the same downward direction. (Would this be a "duvet divot?")

See if you can find examples of all three in the photos above.

Labels: coastal plain, primary structures, sediment

Last week on one of the many field excursions, I found a nice cobble of amygdular basalt. Amygdules are vesicles (bubbles in degassing lava that didn't get the chance to pop before the lava solidified into igneous rock) that have been filled in with mineral deposits. In the mid-Atlantic, most amygdules are found in the Neoproterozoic lava flows of the Catoctin Formation, from which my cobble was presumably derived. The amygdules are typically filled in with zeolites, quartz, and jasper. This one doesn't show any jasper, but the basalt still appears to be basalt, too -- whereas the Catoctin typically is metamorphosed to greenstone / greenschist. I've noticed an association between jaspery amygdules and epidote formation in the metaingeous rock.

As with Skolithos-bearing Antietam Formation quartzite cobbles, clasts of the Catoctin deposited in the river gravels atop the Piedmont/Coastal Plain unconformity indicate a Blue Ridge provenance for the cobbles, and therefore a eastward-flowing river to deposit them 100 million years ago.

I took the cobble back to the lab and sliced it open on the rock saw. The brown circle in the background is a penny for scale.

Here's what the sawn surfaces look like after I sanded them down a bit and then scanned them:

Right purty, ain't it?

Labels: basalt, blue ridge, coastal plain, primary structures, sediment, virginia