12 December 2016
Fossils as strain markers: the boudinaged belemnites of the Swiss Alps
Posted by Callan Bentley
Don’t you hate it when plate tectonics ruins a perfectly good fossil? This is a sketch of a belemnite from the Swiss Alps:
The thing has been broken into segments, with calcite filling the gaps between the segments. What a bummer! Now we’re going to have a much harder time reconstructing the life habits of the organism that left this fossil behind… It was a squid-like thing, with an internal skeleton made of calcite, roughly shaped like a bullet. That’s the “hard part” that fossilized and is so hopelessly shattered in the example shown above:
… But wait! Perhaps there’s a silver lining to this fractured fossil. Let’s take another look:
Structural geologist Albert Heim realized that this is a terrific resource for quantifying the change in the rock’s shape. We can use the original fossil material coupled with the new vein material to get a sense of how deformed the rock containing them is.
You can measure the length of the individual dark colored fossil segments, and you can measure the overall length of the final post-boudinaged fossil, and you can compare them.
Original length, lo (black belemnite pieces only) = 82 mm
Final length, lf (black segments + white vein material in between them) = 185 mm
Now we can calculate elongation (e) and stretch (S).
e = (lf-lo) / lo = (185-82) / 82
e = 1.3
S = 2.3
So the sample was lengthened by +130% at least, resulting in a final fossil-adjacent portion of the rock that was 230% as long as it originally was. *
I bring all this up because I recently came into possession of three samples of deformed belemnites from this same site (or a similar one). My colleague Declan De Paor is retiring, and he turned over much of his structural geology rock collection to me. I’ve made GIGAmacro images of the specimens, for the sake of sharing them with you here.
Enjoy!
Link 0.73 Gpx GIGAmacro by Callan Bentley
Link 1.24 Gpx GIGAmacro by Callan Bentley
Link 0.44 Gpx GIGAmacro by Callan Bentley
* Declan points out in a post-post email that this technique is flawed. See the details in the first comment below.
Declan points out that this simple calculation is not a perfect technique:
Callan, do you know the location those belemnites came from? I’m over in the Rhone Valley near Martigny in a few days time and would love to have a look around
Thanks Linda
Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have that information handy. I just looked in the places I thought I might find it, and I couldn’t locate it. Bummer! Good luck tracking them down.
Enjoy the video my kids made on belemnites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgA0hDyvo9I&t=124s
For future reference Linda (and anyone else interested) they most likely came from a slate quarry at Leytron, in Valais – not far from Martigny. My (dim) memory of a brief visit on a student trip was of some scree/spoil on the north side of the valley at Leytron, accessed via a minor road. 46.192131, 7.209487 on Google Maps (roughly).