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4 September 2020

Friday fold: Home décor

Busy weeks lately; apologies for the minimal bloggery, friends. For this week’s Friday fold, I offer you a view of some of the outdoor decorations at our new house: In the lower basket there is a cut and polished block of Castile Formation rock gypsum + limestone, showing varves that have been folded, apparently by hydration/dehydration volume changes of the gypsum/anyhdrite laminae: This is from the State Line outcrop on …

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30 September 2016

Friday fold: Torqued talc from the 2016 Biggs awardee

Callan’s colleague Joshua Villalobos won the 2016 Biggs Award. He also makes GigaPans of folds, like these talc-bearing rocks of the Allamoore Formation.

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27 May 2016

Friday fold: Castile Formation GIGAmacro

I’ve posted here before about the extraordinary intra-layer folds in the varved evaporite deposits of West Texas’ Permian Basin, but today I can go one better and offer a GIGAmacro look at these lovely folds: Link GIGAmacro by Callan Bentley Enjoy checking these amazing small-scale folds out. They will boggle your mind.

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1 December 2015

Which way’s up? Check cavity fills.

When snail shells are deposited in a bunch of sediment, they serve as tiny architectural elements, with a “roof” that protects their interiors. Any sediment mixed into the shell’s interior will settle out (more or less horizontally), and then there will be empty space (filled with water, probably) above that. As burial proceeds and diagenesis begins, that pore space may be filled with a mineral deposit, such as sparry calcite. …

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2 September 2015

The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr

I just finished this excellent memoir by Mary Karr, mostly about her childhood, mostly in east Texas. It’s not explicitly geological but it does feature an oil town economy and a hurricane, as well as some consideration of the Rocky Mountain Front Range in Colorado. I didn’t read it out of any illusions it would be geological, though – I selected it from the library shelf more from a desire …

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10 February 2015

Pisolites in the Tansil Formation, Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico

Pisolites are large primary concretions that develop in backreef or lagoonal settings such as the Permian Tansil Formation of New Mexico, into which is cut the enormous hole called Carlsbad Caverns.

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4 November 2014

Joints highlighted with hematite, Anapra Sandstone, Cristo Rey

Good morning. Here are two images from last March’s “Border to Beltway” field trip to West Texas, on the north flanks of the Cristo Rey laccolith. Specifically, these are Cretaceous strata of the Anapra Sandstone, looking at the bedding plane of the rocks. Cutting across bedding are a series of fractures (joints) that have been highlighted by the oxidation of iron (rusting) along their edges. In the first photo, the …

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3 July 2014

Bell Canyon’s Permian submarine landslide

What are these Border to Beltway students up to?… Clearly, they are all immersed in their field notebooks, sketching away. This was in March, in west Texas. There must be something worth drawing at this road cut… A clue can be seen on the wall of rock behind them. There, you can find features such as this: And this: And this: Those are outsized clasts of gray limestone in fine-grained …

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20 June 2014

Friday fold: the Castile Formation at the State line outcrop

The Friday fold visits the Permian basin of west Texas. There, the Castile Formation exhibits gorgeous inter- and intra-bed folding.

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19 June 2014

A preview of tomorrow’s post

That’s the State Line outcrop south of the Guadalupe Mountains, along the Texas / New Mexico border. Know what you can find there? Tune in tomorrow to find out…

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