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22 December 2016

Dikes at Bunnahabhain

Yesterday I blogged the stromatolites to be seen in northeastern Islay, south along the shore from the distillery at Bunnahabhain. The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that in this GigaPan, there’s more going on than merely Neoproterozoic carbonates: Link 1.46 Gpx GigaPan by Callan Bentley There’s also a prominent dolerite dike, weathering out recessively. A photo, centered on the GigaPanned dike: This is but one of several to be …

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21 December 2016

Stromatolites of Bunnahabhain

Remember the diamictite I featured here a few weeks ago, from Islay? It was the one that might be a Snowball Earth diamictite. Well, if you follow Snowball Earth science at all, you’ll doubtless be aware that the glaciogenic sediments are characteristically overlain by “cap” carbonates. There’s a stratigraphic successor to the Port Askaig Tillite, too – it’s called the Bonahaven Dolomite. Unlike what you might expect for a cap …

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9 December 2016

Friday fold: Machir Bay I

It’s Friday! Today’s fold comes to you from Neoproterozoic metasediments on the west side of Islay, at Machir Bay.

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30 November 2016

“Drumsticks” of Islay tillite

One fun thing about examining the Port Askaig Tillite in the field is to find odd-shaped exemplars of the unit lying on Islay’s beaches. My favorites were shaped like wands, or antennae, or perhaps the drumsticks freshly detached from a Thanksgiving turkey… a big clast at one end and then a thin septum of the finer-grained matrix to hang on to: Here’s an example: The shape results from differential weathering …

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29 November 2016

Islay’s Port Askaig tillite

The Port Askaig Tillite is a Neoproterozoic diamictite on the eastern shore of Islay (Scotland) that may record a “Snowball Earth” glaciation.

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25 November 2016

Friday fold: intrafolial folds in Eriboll mylonite

At the birthplace of the term “mylonite,” we can find Friday folds hidden in the foliation.

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24 November 2016

U-turn

Scotland was glaciated during the Pleistocene “Ice Ages:” The signatures of glaciation are manifold in a scene like this. Most prominent and easily recognizable is the broad, relatively flat-bottomed U-shaped valley. Now check this one out: That’s a U-turn in a U-shaped valley: the valley is first gouged to the right, then turning around and heading in almost the reverse direction: Good things these things flow so slow, otherwise that …

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16 November 2016

Cobble diversity of Fetlar’s beaches

Now that we’ve examined the geology of the outcrops at Funzie Bay on the island of Fetlar in northeast Shetland, let’s stroll along two beaches. Here we have cobbles from Funzie Beach and a small beach eroded from serpentenite and metaharzburgite of the island’s ophiolite complex. Compare. Contrast. Rejoice. Link GigaPan by Callan Bentley Link GigaPan by Callan Bentley Both of these were handheld panoramas of ~60 photos apiece. It’s …

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8 November 2016

Funzie

Funzie Bay in eastern Fetlar, Shetland, is the place with a stretched-pebble metaconglomerate that triggered the development of the Flinn Diagram. Join Callan on a pilgrimage of structural geology to this special place.

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7 November 2016

Coastal colluvium + coal contest in context

Here’s the answer to the contest: This is an outcrop on the beach at Funzie Bay, Fetlar, Shetland, U.K. The modern beach sediment is the lightest-colored, rounded cobbles at both the top and bottom of the photo. Poking out in between is a layer of light-gray colluvium (angular fragments) overlain by dark peat, now perhaps approaching lignite. Because peat in Shetland cloaks the hillsides but is unlikely to grow a …

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