12 August 2015

Guesses, hints, and annotations

Posted by Callan Bentley

Yesterday, I posted a panorama and asked you what you saw. Responses offered as comments on the blog were modest, but there was more activity on Twitter: Here are those responses:

The best place for eliciting responses, however, appeared to be the AGU Facebook page.

What do you see here?http://ow.ly/QL4Ps (Mountain Beltway at #AGUblogs)

Posted by American Geophysical Union (AGU) on Tuesday, August 11, 2015

an angular uncomformity.
Like · Reply · 7 · 19 hrs
2 Replies
 Juan Leonardo Vargas Fault line,also there are a number of features that resemble faces, some on the cutaway and also in the tree branches and also a person, ,possibly a boy about 10 or 11 yrs.old..
Like · Reply · 5 · 19 hrs
 Wajahat Abbasi Thurst fault smile emoticon
Like · Reply · 2 · 19 hrs
 Clark Davis Not sure but thanks for asking!!
Like · Reply · 2 · 10 hrs
 Ted Asher the face of Jesus?
Like · Reply · 1 · 17 hrs
 Joe Miller A guy ready to jump.
Like · Reply · 1 · 17 hrs
 Sean Daniels anticline, syncline, with lower volcanics.. some local to regional faulting and folding as the driver of the structure.
Like · Reply · 1 · 14 hrs

Aradia Farmer reverse thrust fault, mud, rocks, grass, trees, human

Like · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
Scott Ehlert You can’t tell much for certain but probably a fault. Could be a slide or something else.
Like · Reply · 1 · 16 hrs
Like · Reply · 1 · 12 hrs
Devon Dowell Unconformity
Like · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
Like · Reply · 1 · 15 hrs
Massimo Moretti A thrust?
Like · Reply · 1 · 19 hrs
Chun-Joong Chang (thrust ) Fault line (not unconformity), because of (1) the different bedding angles, (2) the crushed fault rocks of upper part and (3) vertical joints cut by the fault.
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 hrs · Edited
Arslan Zaheer A man with a white shirt .tongue emoticon
Like · Reply · 1 · 16 hrs
Saeed Kamboh thurst fault
Like · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
Jake Fabian Phosfat hanging wall and foot wall
Like · Reply · 1 · 19 hrs
David Glueck History all history
Like · Reply · 1 · 10 hrs
Phùng Văn Phách Active fault!
Ammar Yousaf thrust fault
Dana Roxanne Widmark Kid with a tripod camera perch, and a bunch of geological terms I can’t remember.
Del Les Then deformation
Del Les Volcanism, metamorphism, them
Xela Sabungero earthquake fault line
James Nicholas Hervey Half a collapsed hill with no clearly defined strata.
Abimbola Ogunyele fault & joints
Mike Renz I am going with a small overthrust fault.
Like · Reply · 1 · 18 hrs
Marc Davison a good place to mine…and an ancient thrust fault ?
باكو جان unconfomity … joints ??
 Jonathan Kuehl an old quarry devoid of tastey space crabs?

 

Some of those appear to be earnest efforts at interpreting this outcrop. Others are typical Facebook gobbledygook and people being smartasses.

If you’re one of those who’s interested in figuring this thing out, we’ll take the next step today. I’ll ask you to take another look, this time with annotations sketched in. I’ve traced out bedding (where visible) in the version of the image below:

dragonstongue_south_ice-25anno_sm Click to enlarge

Additional clues: these are Pennsylvanian aged strata exposed near the eastern edge of the Alleghany Plateau in northern West Virginia, along a newly-opened stretch of Corridor H, the east-west highway that has been under construction here for the better part of a decade.

Does that change your opinion of what’s going on here?