Friday Field Foto (Geopics, Day 5)

Today's picture is from south-central Utah near the town of Sevier. I'm not sure what the name of the conglomerate the students are running around on, but it's approximately correlative to the Indianola or Price River formations (Late Cretaceous). This is stuff that was tumbling down the mountains being uplifted during the Sevier orogeny.

I was shooting pictures with a tilt-shift lens, so I made everything look a little funky on purpose. But you can also see the canon-ball-sized boulders that make up much of this sedimentary rock.

Geology Photos, Day 4 - Unintentionally Ironic

Whoa, Ron and Evelyn both beat me to the pictures this morning.



On our return from Glacier National Park last summer, my wife and I stopped at Teddy Roosevelt NP to take in a few quick sights. I thought the warning sign was a reasonable statement at several time scales.

Geology Photos, Day 3 - Quartz Arenite

Evelyn's got a really cool picture of a coral "boulder." But when they're that sized, do they really qualify as boulders? And what if it's cemented to the material beneath it? Is it just a pinnacle? Although since we're all travelers on a little blue pebble, perhaps one needs to acknowledge the context and worry less about specific descriptors of scale...



Today's picture is of some quartz sand. But not just any sand. This sand is from a block of disaggregated sandstone of the Wonewoc Formation and is an excellent example of a texturally and compositionally "mature" sand. This stuff has been knocking around long enough that almost all of the other minerals that one finds in "sand" have weathered away. This particular sandstone is typically over 95% quartz - allowing us to call the sandstone as a quartz arenite. Another cool word.

One of the reasons petroleum production companies are interested in mining this sand is its purity. Also, the smooth, round grains behave well in hydro-fracking development.

Geology Photos, Day 2

Evelyn's continuing the geology photos, and I can't think of a reason not to follow suit.

"Hey, since when is Pismo Beach in a cave?"

I blogged about this image before - some critter was doing a little bioturbation. If this burrow fills in with sediment and we were to then view this filled burrow in a soil profile, we might use the term "krotovina," which is a Russian word for a filled-in animal burrow. What a lovely word - perhaps Evelyn could use that for the next time she comes around to K for her geo words.