17 August 2018

Friday folds: Moomaw Reservoir outcrops

Posted by Callan Bentley

My friends Josh Benton and Kristi Leigh are the sources of this week’s Friday folds.

Kristi reports that on a recent kayaking trip, they visited:

Lake Moomaw, a reservoir that’s just about 3 hours away in western Virginia.

The Gathright dam blocks the Jackson River and the lake first filled to capacity in 1982 – relatively recent for US reservoirs! Ostensibly Lake Moomaw was created for flood control and to dilute pollution from a downstream paper mill in Covington.

They saw a bunch of folds in the Devonian-aged sedimentary rocks exposed on the sides of the reservoir. Josh’s orange kayak serves as a sense of scale in these photos:

A subtle antiform:

And a complimentary subtle synform:

Thanks for sharing, Josh and Kristi!