At the edge of the intrusion

Mountain Beltway reader Greg Willis attended my colleague Ken Rasmussen’s Triassic Rift Valley field course last weekend, and sent me this photo of the view inside the Luck Stone diabase quarry in Centreville, Virginia:

Here’s an annotated version:

Both photos are enlargeable by clicking on them (twice).

This quarry chews into rock right along the contact between a mafic igneous intrusion and lake sediments that formed when water pooled in a low-lying continental basin that formed during the breakup of Pangea. This rift valley, the Culpeper Basin, is just one prominent basin in a whole series of Triassic grabens and half-grabens that run through the Piedmont north and south of here, including all the way to the Bay of Fundy.

A similar environment can be seen today in east Africa, where a modern rift valley hosts similar lake deposits and mafic igneous rocks:

If you were to drop maybe half a kilometer below the surface of the Afar region, you’d see a similar situation to the one that produced Greg’s quarry photo ~200 million years ago.

Visiting the Centreville quarry is by permission of the Luck Stone corporation only; the best way to see it is by signing up for Ken’s course the next time it rolls around!

The LaHood Conglomerate

The Belt Supergroup is a series of sedimentary strata laid down in the Belt Sea, an inland sea (like modern Hudson Bay) that existed in the northwestern (by present coordinates) part of ancestral North America during the Mesoproterozoic era of geologic time. Estimates of the absolute age of these rocks range from 1470 to 1400 Ma. Mostly, it’s siltstones (argillites) and limestones, including the multicolored strata so gloriously displayed at Glacier National Park in Montana. But there are some coarser units, too. My favorite is the LaHood Formation, which is a beautiful diamictite well exposed in the canyon of the Jefferson River just east of Cardwell, Montana.

Check out this gorgeous rock (sawn, polished, lacquered, and scanned):

Here it is again, rotated by 90°:

You can click through (twice) for both of these images to get big versions if you want more details. The prominent pinkish clast in the upper scan is a myrmekitic granite, and the prominent grayish clast in the lower scan is marble. These are pieces of the Archean basement complex (Wyoming Terrane), such as we see exposed in the Gallatin Range or the Beartooth Plateau. Note their well-rounded shapes: these cobbles traveled some distance before reaching their depositional location. You can also see pebbles of potassium feldspar, milky quartz, and rock fragments, all set in a dirty sandstone matrix.

Because of the coarse grain size, especially relative to other Belt units, the LaHood conglomerate is interpreted to have been deposited along the southeastern shore of the Belt Sea. Here’s a sketch from my field notebook (from 2008) showing this basic depositional interpretation:

While some of the sediment has been sourced to Montana rocks, I am told that some of it comes from some other landmass, maybe Antarctica or Siberia, indicating their possible paleo-proximity to what is today the northern Rocky Mountains, USA.

Strath vs. terrace graphic

There is an old Chinese aphorism that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” One of the naming conventions that tends to trip up NOVA students who hike the Billy Goat Trail with me is the difference between a “terrace” and a “strath.” This morning, I created a graphic that illustrates the difference between these two landforms as I understand it:

Both features are shown in cross-sectional cartoon view. Terraces are cut into alluvium, the unconsolidated sediment deposited by the same river which is now incising. Straths, on the other hand, have the same shape but are etched into bedrock. Another name for straths would be “bedrock terraces.” Straths will sometimes have a thin veneer of alluvium atop them: in my experience along the Billy Goat Trail, this consists of abandoned bedload from older, higher base levels, augmented by lighter-weight flood deposits.

Would anyone with more geomorphological knowledge than me care to qualify / critique / correct my understanding on this terminological issue? Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: Based on Anne’s comments below, I’ve tweaked it a bit:

Falls of the James III: river work

In today’s post, I’ll finish up with my geologic discussion of the falls of the James River in Richmond Virginia, south of Belle Isle. Previously, we’ve examined the bedrock at this location (the Petersburg Granite) and a series of fractures – some faults and some extensional joints – that deform that granite. Now we come to the final chapter in this story — the story of the river carving up these rocks as it incises downward along the Fall Zone.

Unlike my native Potomac River, there is no gorge carved along the James at the boundary between the metamorphic & igneous rocks of the Piedmont and the overlying Coastal Plain strata to the east.

But there is still some cool stuff to see. In my first post on Belle Isle, I mentioned the diversion dam that keeps the river-bottom bedrock (mostly) dry and available to geological scrutiny. That dam diverted some of the James River into a mill race which led to a hydroelectric power plant that was abandoned a half-century ago. Here’s a map showing the dam, mill race, and some other key features:

You’ll note that’s a Google Earth image that I’ve rotated 90° clockwise to fit it into this vertical-friendly blog space. North is to the right. I’ve highlighted the trends of the NNE- and ENE-oriented fracture sets that I discussed here yesterday, as well as the quarry pond on the north side of Belle Isle. You’ll also note a Δ-shaped logjam at the intake for the mill race. The mill race itself is choked with mud (the bigger debris is strained out at the inlet; but the mud makes it through). There are some mudcracks visible there:

Chuck is trying to talk a colleague into drilling a sediment core through this deposit — easily two meters thick. It might potentially provide an interesting sedimentological (and geochemical) account of the last 50 years.

Let’s zoom in further to the ~dry area of the river bed south of Belle Isle; the part the dam makes accessible to sunbathers, dope-smokers, fisherman, graffiti-artists, and geologists:

Again, north is to the right. You’ll note the obvious trend of the two dominant fracture sets, as well as a large number of elliptical ‘dots.’ These dots are potholes, semi-cylindrical holes that get drilled into the bedrock when water currents maintain vortices (plural of vortex: think a liquid tornado) in one place over an extended period of time. Some of these potholes line up in rows — like perforations at the top of a checkbook, these aligned potholes create planes of weakness that make it easier to pop out large slabs of rock in a quarrying process not unlike what humans do with their ‘plug & feather’ techniques.

In the close-up Google Earth image, at the lower left (southeast), you can see that I’ve placed a pair of black arrows pointing to a train of four potholes. One has a big boulder in it, and then there are three others with an elongated axis in the NNE-direction. We visited this particular chain of holes, and saw something interesting.

Here’s Chuck standing in the second pothole, with the boulder-containing pothole in the foreground:

You can just barely make out the two more northerly potholes in the far distance, but here’s a second shot showing them from the vantage of the northerly tip of the second pothole. The backpack and power plant should provide orienting landmarks:

Now take a look at that first photo again — take particular note of the magmatic schlieren in the bedrock. Recall that schlieren are curtain-like zones of more mafic minerals in the granite. You can see that the schlieren wrap around these potholes. Here, I’ll trace them out (crudely) for you:

Potholes are recent geomorphological features imparted by the river. The schlieren formed ~320 million years ago — how could the older structure wrap around the younger carving? Chuck interprets this to mean that the potholes were etched out from some weaker/less stable rock type — perhaps some of the mafic-composition xenoliths that pepper the Petersburg Granite in this area. Certainly, we can see that the xenoliths often appear in long trains, strung out along the plane of magmatic foliation, and the schlieren wrap around those. If the river exploits the outcropping xenoliths as areas where it’s easier to drill, the ancient positioning of the xenoliths could lead to the modern positioning of the potholes. I’ve seen something very similar on the Billy Goat Trail (Potomac River, downstream of Great Falls), so it wasn’t too difficult for me to buy into this interpretation.

Have any of my readers seeing compositional variations (like xenoliths) controlling river geomorphology elsewhere? Do tell!

Finally, thanks again to Chuck for taking the time to show us around last Friday. Belle Isle is a cool place on many levels, and I’m glad I got the chance to check it out in person.

“Geology of Skyline Drive” w/JMU

I mentioned going out in the field last Thursday with Liz Johnson‘s “Geology of Skyline Drive” lab course at James Madison University.

We started the trip south of Elkton, Virginia, at an exposure where Liz had the students collect hand samples and sketch their key features. Here’s one that I picked up:

Regular readers will recognize those little circular thingies as Skolithos trace fossils, which are soda-straw-like in the third dimension. Rotate the sample by 90°, and you can see the tubes descending through the quartz sandstone:

This is the Antietam Formation, a distinctive quartz sandstone / quartzite in the Blue Ridge geologic province. But at this location, on the floor of the Page Valley and butted up against the Blue Ridge itself, we see something else in the Antietam:

Parts of this outcrop are pervasively shattered: a variety of sized clasts of Antietam quartzite are loosely held together in porcupine-like arrays of fault breccia. Turns out that this is the structural signature of a major discontinuity in the Earth’s crust: the Blue Ridge Thrust Fault. This is the fault that divides the Valley & Ridge province on the west from the Blue Ridge province on the east. And here, thanks to a roadcut on Route 340, we can put our hand on the trace of that major fault. Here’s another piece of the fault breccia:

After grokking on the tectonic significance of this fault surface, we drove up into Shenandoah National Park, to check out some outcrops along Skyline Drive itself, but it was really foggy. Here’s a typical look at the team in the intra-cloud conditions atop the Blue Ridge:

We checked out primary sedimentary structures in the Weverton Formation at Doyles River Overlook (milepost 81.9), like these graded beds (paleo-up towards the bottom of the photo)…

…and these cross-beds. You can see that it was raining on us at this point: hence the partly-wet outcrop and glossy reflection at right:

Cutting through this outcrop was a neat little shear zone where a muddy layer had been sheared out into a wavy/lenticular phyllonite, with a distinctive S-C fabric visible in three dimensions:

Finally, we went to the Blackrock Trail, which leads up to a big boulder field of quartzite described as Hampton (Harpers) Formation. In some places, exquisite cross-bedding was visible, as here (pen for scale):

Here’s a neat outcrop, where you can see the tangential cross beds’ relationship to the main bed boundary below them:

…And then if you spin around to the right, you can see this bedform (with internal cross-bedding) in the third dimension. I’ve laid the pen down parallel to the advancing front of this big ripple:

That last photo also shows the continuing influence of the fog.

Thanks much to Liz for letting me tag along on this outing! It was a great opportunity for me to observe another instructor leading a field trip, and also to discover some new outcrops in the southernmost third of the park.

Flames and pillows, Route 55

I took a look at some interesting blobby structures in the Swift Run Formation last week, and walked readers through my logic in tentatively concluding that they were ball & pillow structures (soft sediment deformation), though overprinted by a pervasive (Alleghanian) cleavage. As we move west in the Appalachian mountain belt, the rocks are less cleaved: the strain is instead taken up in large anticlines and synclines with a few thrust faults thrown in. Though arched and fractured, the rocks’ fabrics remain pretty close to what they were at the time of deposition.

Fortunately, in the Valley & Ridge province along New Route 55 in West Virginia, you can see some sweet examples of (undeformed) ball & pillow in the Hampshire Formation (Devonian; part of the Acadian clastic wedge). Here’s a view looking up at the bottoms of some of these sandy sags (quarter for scale):

I like that partial weathering-out of the features into the third dimension…

To refresh your memory, ball & pillow forms when a heavy load of sand gets dumped (underwater) on top of a soft, squishy deposit of mud. The sand sags downward in broad “balls” (if you have a point locus of sinking) or “pillows” (if the sags have a linear axis to them). In between, the low-viscosity mud squirts up in cuspate “flame” structures. Check out this fine example (quarter for scale), found by GMU structure students Joe M. and Justin O. on the northern side of the road:

…And here we have the same photo, with the sand, mud, flames, and ball & pillow all labeled for you. The white arrows represent the downward sagging of the sand; the red arrows represent the upward squirting of the mud.

In some places, the pillows have weathered out. Here’s one (quarter for scale) that is now upside down on the grassy knoll beneath its source outcrop:

Note the thin laminae of mud clinging to its exterior, like a coat of paint!

Here’s a second sandstone pillow that has weathered out of the cliff and popped down onto the grassy slopes below. Obviously, the surface being photographed is a cross-section through the saggy pillow:

The “upper left” of this sample would have been the lowpoint of the sag if it were in situ on the outcrop. You can see the smooth margin on the left side, and the rougher zone on the right where it detached from the overlying part of the sandy layer. Let’s now zoom in on this box to see something really cool:

If we go deep here, we can see that the laminations of sand within the pillow show small Z-folds (and S-folds on the other side, though they’re not as obvious in the photograph) that are “parasitic” on the main fold. Here they are, highlighted (white arrows) and traced out (black lines):

The axes of these small-scale structures verge on the axis of the main fold, meaning that their axial planes (blue traces) “tip over” with increasing deformation towards parallelism with the main fold’s axial plane. We’ve seen similar things before. The axial planes play the same game as the cleavage plane. This is the first time I have ever observed such a structure associated with soft-sediment deformation, however.

Has anyone else ever seen S- or Z-folds associated with soft sediment deformation? It makes total sense to me that they would be there based on simple physics, but this was the first time I had ever seen it myself. I’d be curious to get a sense of how common or rare this might be.

Ball & pillow in cleaved Swift Run Formation?

On my structural geology field trip this past weekend, I made one major modification compared to last year’s iteration. I added a fifth detailed “field study area” at an outcrop of the Swift Run Formation, a Neoproterozoic sedimentary unit that is discontinuous in extent between the underlying Blue Ridge basement complex and overlying Catoctin Formation meta-basalts. A month ago, I didn’t know about this location, but I was introduced to it by Chuck Bailey on the Transect Trip last month. It’s a perfect complement to my structure students’ detailed examinations of the units above and below it, and the outcrop offers an embarrassment of rich structures to measure, both primary and secondary.

Here’s something I spent some time pondering: are there ball-&-pillow structures preserved in the Swift Run? We definitely see the ‘coarse-sand-dumped-on-mud’ set up that will lead to soft sediment deformation (sagging of heavy sand downward into squishy mud) under the right circumstances.

Okay, so with that in mind, take a look at this:

You’ll notice a clear contact here between dark, fine-grained mud (below) and lighter-colored arkose sand (above). The contact is irregular, so a sedimentologist unschooled in structure might start thinking about soft sediment deformation. But it’s not so simple as that: this rock is cleaved! The photo above is looking down parallel to the cleavage plane. Annotations:

The boundary between the two strata tends to get a bit scrambled at this interface, with an increasingly zig-zaggy trace as deformation proceeds. Now, let’s rotate the same sample by 90°, and check out the trace of the bedding on the cleavage plane itself:

Pretty smooth line, eh? Not nearly so “EKG-ish” as what we observed in the first photo. This suggests that the wigglyness we saw in the first photo is a structural overprint, and not a primary sedimentary feature. We can then breath a sigh of relief, and just use this cleavage plane outcrop to point out what a nice graded bedding contact looks like:

Here’s a second sample, as viewed on the edge where cleavage and bedding intersect. The little white dot is some kind of arthropod egg case; ignore it.

Whoa! significantly more up and down wiggles here to the contact between the two beds. Again, this could be a primary feature (soft sediment deformation), or it could be a structural overprint caused by the development of crenulation cleavage. I note how the bottom of the tan bed shows the large-amplitude wiggles, but the top does not. Now let’s turn this one 90° so we’re facing the cleavage face, and see what we see there:

Some annotations:

I would not expect a structural re-organization of the bedding trace as viewed on the plane of foliation, only 90° to it. So the fact that the second sample shows the wiggles continuing around all exposed faces suggests to me that it is indeed a primary feature, but the alignment of the most-vertical parts of the sags was accentuated by the development of cleavage, as seen on the first face. This interpretation is backed up by the observation that the basal part of the sandy unit (the coarsest part) varies not only in position, but also in thickness as you trace it out around all sides of the sample.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this interpretation though, because of the asymmetry and small-scale “parasitic” wiggles on each of the potential sand “pillows.” Furthermore, when I’ve seen true ball-&-pillow soft-sediment deformation structures in the field, the mud that squishes up is typically in a cuspate form, in stark contrast to the lobate blobs of sand that sink down. Here in this Swift Run sample’s foliation plane, the shape character of the ups appears to match the shape character of the downs. On the first view (looking parallel to the bedding/cleavage intersection), however, I suppose one could argue that the mud approximates a flame structure (cuspate) while the sand pillows look more lobate… but with the cleavage overprint, it sure isn’t super obvious.

Anyone else want to chime in on these two samples? Observations? Interpretations?

More mud

Remember the mud I saw on Pimmit Run?

Turns out that West Virginia mud pulls many of the same tricks as Virginia mud. Here’s some mud cracks I noticed on Sunday afternoon on the shoulder of New Route 55 in eastern West Virginia:

Notice how West Virginia spices her mudcracks with chunks of Silurian quartzite and fresh crabgrass. A tasty combination!

Mud

A few more photos from Pimmit Run … of mud.

This mud has lots of interesting features, including dessication cracks showing lovely 120° triple junctions connecting up with their neighbors, raindrop impressions, and animal tracks.

Tracks of at least three species here:

(Clicking on this one will make it bigger)

Mud: not as fascinating as some things, but it can share some modest insights.

Baked fanglomerate

A quick post to share a few images of an outcrop I visited last September out in California’s Owens Valley. This is a spot where alluvial fans coming off the eastern Sierra Nevada were overrun by a basaltic lava flow (Jeff, Kim, Fred, and Kurt for scale):

The unofficial term for these conglomerates deposited by alluvial fans is “fanglomerate,” and it’s pretty cool to see the contact metamorphism at the top of the fanglomerate. There’s also some weakly-developed columnar jointing in the basalt. Here’s an annotated version, in case the contact wasn’t quite obvious enough:

Here’s a close up (Doug for scale), showing the orange zone of thermal metamorphism at the top of the fanglomerate as the lava flow above baked the hell out of it:

Groovy, eh? Where’s your favorite example of contact metamorphism?