15 November 2012
Posted by Callan Bentley
Quartzite, shattered and healed and shattered again and again and again. It’s cataclasite, seen in the North Carolina Piedmont and inferred to be Mesozoic in age due to its brittle style of deformation.
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.
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such a fun name – am I right in assuming the name shares the same etymology as “cataclysm?” And nice Emriver mech pencil for scale 🙂
That “cata” prefix is a fun one… catalyst is another eg. And “clast” means “broken.”
Is the quartzite or deformation Mesozoic?
The deformation is Mesozoic. I’m not sure of the age of the quartzite – could be a Mesozoic vein, or a metasedimentary unit that is part of the Neoacadian story.