17 June 2016
Posted by Callan Bentley
While soaking at some fine outdoor hot springs in southern Iceland (near Höfn) last week, I spied a Friday fold on the rock wall above the hot pots:
Iceland is not a place where we would expect to find ductile folds in already-lithified rocks, so I’m guessing that these are folds related to flow in the lavas as they erupted at the surface.
Happy Friday!
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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The photographs are really good. Are there other types of flow structures observed there?
I’ll bet someone more familiar with the details of Icelandic geology than me would be able to point you to plenty of examples. The whole island is lava flows, right? So surely a lot of them show similar structures.