15 March 2012
An edgy outcrop
Posted by Callan Bentley
That’s a big pile of alluvial fan deposits (and colluvial debris?) on the eastern edge of the highway leading from Cape Town down to Rooiels. It’s not lithified, but it does seem to be at least partially cemented (perhaps by caliche?), because the outcrop face is essentially vertical, and there seems to be very little sediment that’s falling down onto the road (at least on the day I visited). It’s way steeper than any kind of reasonable angle of repose. It made me nervous to drive past these roadcuts – I kept envisioning it suddenly collapsing right as we motored past, pushing our rental car out into False Bay, and then my story would be plastered all over The Landslide Blog!
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.
[…] eye might be drawn to the colluvium at the far right (same stuff we saw at this outcrop last week), but that’s not why I took the photo. Instead, zoom in on the tilted layers of Malmesbury […]