12 December 2013
Some folds along the Crypt Lake trail
Posted by Callan Bentley
Hiking up to Crypt Lake in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada, you can see some sweet stromatolites,
We’ve already taken a look at the falls, but today, let’s zoom into the folds exposed in that shadowy cliff near the center…
These limestone layers are Mesoproterozoic in age – they’re part of the Purcell (Belt) Supergroup. The folding likely dates to the late Cretaceous into early Paleogene “Laramide” Orogeny (as they call it in Canada, though the structural style and location is fundamentally NOT Laramide in the U.S. sense of the word. A Montanan geologist would call this Sevier-style thin-skinned deformation instead).
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.