13 April 2012

Friday folds: Turpan Depression

Posted by Callan Bentley

Rob Simmon of NASA’s Earth Observatory is the source for today’s Friday folds. Last week, he tweeted this image to me:

That’s a excellent example of the outcrop pattern of a more or less horizontal outcrop of folded rock. To the north is a synform (notice that where streams have eroded it, the bull’s-eye pattern takes a notch inward toward the center of the structure), and to the south, a chocolate-colored (basement-cored?) antiformal uplift, with a much craggier topography.

This pair of folds are in the Turpan Depression of China. Rob found them while working on a piece about the hottest place on Earth, somewhere in the middle of a much broader picture of the area. Here’s a taste of some of the other geomorphological and structural wonders you can see in the original source image:

That’s something worth of Pathological Geomorphology, eh?

Happy Friday, and thanks for contributing the fold, Rob!