This is so true, and don't forget the fossils I sent you with the plethora of rocks.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

I'd love to do a geological tour of the British Isles where so much of the science was developed.

Terms like Old Red Sandstone|, Lias, the Ironstone, The Greensand, Oxford clay, Siccar Point, are redonent with so much science history, one can imagine the shades of Sedgwick, Murchinson, Lyell, Hutton, Anning, the Mantells, Owen, Jukes.Smith, Buckland, Darwin, and so many others, haunting those exposures.

Jon

that's two quotable quotes in succession ...

eg:


still looking for those, but in the meantime how about some Cambrian archaeocyathids (Wilkawillina Limestone) from the same field trip?


I haven't found the upper slab yet, only the last of the easier-to-reach pieces (since removed):




*the colours are oversaturated to enhance the details ...

I should mention that the hand(s) holding the limestone and sandstone were on secondment from Adelaide uni ...
but the young gentleman modelling what the honor student of the new millenium wears in the field was a Flinders boy ...

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I was there 83-87, then head west for a stint on the Yilgarn. I know a few people at Curtin, mostly (hangs head in shame) geophysicists.

Jon

Nice.

Your Itchy Itchy A.. sounds like a place I'd enjoy. Much like the Poleta Folds where I did my geology field mapping exercise. Cambrian sedimentary formations heavily folded and faulted.

I have a few archaeocyathids laying around the house.

My favourite rocks! I did a PhD on the Wilkawillina limestone! At Wilkawillina Gorge no less.

For the benefit of others, the archaeocyaths (an ancient group of sponges found only in the Early Cambrian) are the circular structures. The dark grey material surrounding them are growths of a calcified calcimicrobe called Renaclis, probably a facultively photosynthetic organism, that binds the archaeos into a rigid framework, forming a reef. The light grey material is either carbonate mud that is filtered down between the framework elements, or coarsely crystalline cement, precipiated directly from seawater.

Jon

It's the same formations as Staithes. The Ironstone seams were the basis of the steel industry on Teesside, there were dozens of mines, all closed by the 1960s. Out on the coast the Ironstone was originaly just picked from the beach and cliffs, then drift mined. Further inland drifts and shafts are common.

In fact one mine survives at Boulby just inland from Staithes. It is now a Potash mine and the deepest mine in Europe. It houses the Dark Matter Lab. It's far deeper than any of the Ironstone.

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Here's photo of the Saltburn iron ball chrissy sent me (the coin is the size of a US quarter - I thought it was a quarter):

I think this is one of the archaeocyathid rocks I collected from my work at Poleta Folds? Lower Cambrian Poleta Formation.

Sorry to divert the conversation from the Flinders Ranges, but I couldn't help myself. You guys are talking about rocks!!

That was one of the smaller ones, it would have cost a fortune to mail the bigger ones as they are heavy. I still have that large lump of flint to down size and send to you from Suffolk, and some others too.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

My family dug those things out of the ground lol (well grand and great grandparents)

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What's a facultively photosynthetic organism, if you don't mind me asking?

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no need to apologise at all, geonuc ...

there was both teasing and challenging in our Flinders comments -
the Ranges and the university* ...

just as Jon would love to tour the geology of Britain, I've got a hankering to follow some of the western North American successions ... and a couple of decent drinking spots there, too, I'd expect ...

*well, a bit ...
apart from being above the pollution line, Flinders' Bentley campus encompasses some pretty good exposures of the Precambrian Sturt Tillite:





>>hmm ... "balls of iron" ... no - don't go there ...<<

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yes ... come back to this - tell us/show us more, if you can ...

I really don't know enough about the area (and I'm way too ... lazy ... to research it if I don't have to ...), and I'm trying to figure out the rock in your photo ...

is it a soft limestone? and the grey discolouration? volcanic ash? or dolomitisation (magnesium ion substitution of calcium ions in aqueous solution)?

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What photo? Did I miss a jlhredshift photo?

The BAUT album only allows 97.7 KB and all the photos are between 1500 and 2500 KB. So, I am going to try your method.


Cran: the outcrop is on Little Cottonwood Canyon rd USGS quadrangle 378, Hellgate creek area approx 111 36' long by 40 39' lat. I think it is Gardison limestone early Mississippian and I thought it was an algal mat. The formation has been folded and this outcrops dip is about 45 degrees.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

Let's see if this works:

link to flicker

Edit: it works enjoy

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

The pictures if you put them in your personal profile will automatically get reduced not like when you are trying to upload them straight to here.

Nice pictures BTW, very interesting.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

certainly the lower layers appear stromatolitic (ie, layered algal mats), but the structures seem to change moving up through time - the more weathered "cheesy" section strikes me as coccolithic (cliffs of Dover and Normandy stuff - still warm shallow sea environment, but deeper water than one would expect for algal mats), and the darker more resistant layers suggest some kind of long term cyclic interruption to the normal pattern - eg, periodic vulcanism, or influx of foreign material ...

but that's just guesswork based on quick looks at your excellent* photos ...

*when you photograph interesting stuff like this, I hope you include a few with a measuring standard ... it could be any common item (a coin, a pen, a calculator, etc ... using people is less accurate, but still gives a sense of scale) ...

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this one? it kind of slipped in edgewise while other things were going on -
that's why it took me a while to come back to it ...
Geology Discussion

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I think Jon meant facultatively:

- from http://www.medterms.com/script/main/...ticlekey=31986


- from
http://dictionary.die.net/facultative



>>I'm pretty sure he wasn't suggesting the faculty were slime<<

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In other photos from that trip there indeed are such things as my pen, hat, and rock hammer. But these photos were taken with the zoom lens because of accessibility issues or (sigh) haste.

100_1753 is the original from which the thumbnail was made in the earlier post that GEONUC happened to miss .

(I just realized that I had hard boiled eggs for lunch, three bowls of ham and beans for supper, and now I'm drinking a beer; hmmmm..)

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

a quick sniff around the Gardison Limestone suggests crinoids and horn corals ... and the Delle Phosphatic Event ... and episodic shifts between aerobic and anaerobic depositions ...

I didn't do that well in Rock Identification at Curtin uni, either ...
more the desktop research-type - that's me ...

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I remember that while I stood there and looked at the formation the question of how long the deposition took to form the forty feet or so of the outcrop; sort of like the scene from the movie Time Machine as the Sun sped through the sky faster and faster. And no one was there to see it. (sounds of waves lapping and brief wisps of wind but otherwise ..silence..)

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

I don't know how I missed your earlier rock photo. I usually have a reliable rock radar.

Anyway, very interesting and nicely exposed outcrop in your photos. As soon as I saw it, it screamed shallow carbonate depositional environment to me.

BTW, I often fail to put a scale object in my pictures. My geology professors would be embarrassed.

I thank all of you for your generous comments.

We have all probably seen maps reconstructing Pangea through the Paleozoic. To me that outcrop is the shore of an island arc yet to be carried to where it rests now. We can know its approximate age, we can never know the details of its specific journey, but I can imagine it. Fascinating.

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

For the Thanksgiving break, I plan on visiting Guadalupe Mountains National Park, the world's finest example of a fossilized reef, and the Davis Mountains, an area of Cenozoic Era volcanoes.

well, I was something of a late bloomer - if I'd had anything resembling a normal life (whatever that is), we might have crossed paths at the time - I would have matriculated (yr 12 equivalent) in '77, but would have had little interest in going straight into university - travel first ...

the Yilgarn? (for the non-Oz residents - a Precambrian cratonic province in south Western Australia) -
looking for nickel? gold? or something else?

Don't feel bad about that - my Dad (a retired rock-hound*) counts among his closest mates: one geophysicist, and one self-taught prospector ...

One of my Curtin lecturers was Simon Wilde (Jack Hills zircon discovery) - didn't do any harm to my interest in early planetary evolution ...

*exploration/field geologist


but John, figuring out the details of its specific journey is a big part of the geo's job ... you already know that at least part of the journey was vertical ...

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Keep an eye open for shark teeth. I would also recommend Mike Everhart's site Oceans of Kansas.

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"