Advertisement

You are browsing the archive for jurassic Archives - Mountain Beltway.

5 June 2020

Friday fold: Harbledown Island

Reader Christian Gronau writes with this Friday fold contribution: Greetings from Cortes Island, BC – at the opposite end of the Strait vis-a-vis Lopez Island. Your Mountain Beltway blog is always of interest, and I have been following it for several years by now. Thank you for putting the effort into this worthwhile website. Quite regularly your posts elicit “echoes” and make me go back to some of my own …

Read More >>

1 Comment/Trackback >>


6 September 2019

Friday fold: Gonzen, Switzerland

Science writer Gabe Popkin shared two fold photos with me this week – both from near Sargans, Switzerland, adjacent to the Rhine River Valley and the border with Lichtenstein. The photos shows the mountain called Gonzen. There, Jurassic limestones crop out in a very wavy pattern: I don’t know the geology of this area in any kind of detail, but I decided to trace out a distinctive upper surface of …

Read More >>

2 Comments/Trackbacks >>


11 October 2016

A virtual field trip to Portrush, Northern Ireland

One of my favorite places in Northern Ireland is the east side of the peninsula that hosts the tourist town of Portrush. There, two early schools of geological thought engaged in a battle. The opposing sides were: the Neptunists, who thought all stratified rocks, and in particular basalt, must form from precipitation from the sea, and the Plutonists, who thought some rocks, including basalt, formed through intrusion of molten rock …

Read More >>

No Comments/Trackbacks >>


13 November 2015

Friday fold: chevron-folded chert

Samuele Jæger Papeschi is the source for today’s fold: Those are: chevron-folds in radiolarian cherts – Jurassic radiolariti fm. – Quercianella – Leghorn, Italy Cool. They look a lot like the chevron-folded cherts near San Francisco. Same age, too.

Read More >>

No Comments/Trackbacks >>


7 August 2015

Friday fold: Yin-Yang at Swift Dam

What is Matt looking at here? Matt was one of my Rockies students this summer, a geology major at the University of Virginia. Together with another UVA student and students from Mary Washington University and George Mason University, Matt embarked on a mountain-climbing hike during our evening camping at Swift Dam, near Depuyer, Montana. The hikers were treated to an extraordinary sight when they attained the summit: Click to embiggen; …

Read More >>

No Comments/Trackbacks >>


12 January 2015

Bedding / intrusion relationships, Ferrar dikes, Antarctica

Another pair of shots of the Ferrar mafic intrusives from Antarctica, courtesy of Lauren Michel… Zooming in more… There are some major disruptions to the strata – I wonder if the story is more complicated than my simple annotation suggests…

Read More >>

No Comments/Trackbacks >>


7 January 2015

A mafic sill in Antarctica

My friend and colleague Lauren Michel, the King Family Fellow at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, sent me this image from her recent trip to Antarctica: (click to enlarge) This is a beautiful example of a mafic igneous sill, probably of the rock known as “dolerite” (or diabase, to us Yanks). Lauren and I think it must be part of the Ferrar Large Igneous Province. …

Read More >>

1 Comment/Trackback >>


5 October 2011

Two Sisters

All this talk about footprints and tail traces, and I haven’t even shown you any “for sure” dinosaur fossils. Well, let’s remedy that today. We return now to the scene: exposures of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, on the east side of the Bighorn Basin, just north of Shell, Wyoming. I was wandering around, finding things like ripples and lichens and cobbles of chert that had multiple intersecting conchoidal fractures, and …

Read More >>

2 Comments/Trackbacks >>


4 October 2011

Tall tail

Okay, so I was out photographing ripples and admiring lichens, and then I saw this: That’s a rippled slab of sandstone, but with a linear groove that obliquely cross-cuts the ripple marks. Smaller, parallel grooves lie within the main groove. Here’s another look at that same one, spun around and zoomed-in: It looks as if something was dragged through the wet sand at this location, prior to its lithification. Given …

Read More >>

6 Comments/Trackbacks >>


1 October 2011

Ripple marks and cross beds in the Morrison Formation

This past summer, the day after my examination of basement complex along the Colorado/Wyoming border, I drove north to Greybull, and then with Virginia Museum of Natural History paleontologist Butch Dooley to a dinosaur dig site north of Shell, Wyoming. There, in the Bighorn Basin west of the Bighorn Mountains, are dinosaur-bearing exposures of the Jurassic Morrison Formation. While Butch and his son and his two volunteers went to work …

Read More >>

5 Comments/Trackbacks >>