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Geobulletin
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News from the Geoblogosphere
by Stratigraphy.net
New from Snet:
Lithologs
, a new tool to create lithological/sedimentological logs online..
Blog post recommendation
Valley of the Angry Fingers (& a geo-challenge)
Angry Finger, one of many. Gods were nowhere to be seen.In April I toured the
Valley of the Gods
in southeast Utah, east of Utah Highway 261 below the Moki Dugway. It’s underlain by the Cutler Formation … actually it’s called “lower Cutler beds” here because geologists can't agree on a name(s). The rocks are Pennsylvanian-Permian in age, roughly 300 million years old. It's a red landscape: red soil, red cliffs and eye-catching red pinnacles, many of them named.
More angry fingers, on right and distant left (
source
). We're in the habit of naming rock outcrops that have suggestive shapes. There are plenty here, thanks to the erosion-resistant Cedar Mesa sandstone, which provides protective caps for softer Cutler rocks. Santa Claus, Rudolph, a rooster, a setting hen, a bell, a battleship, seven sailors, and De Gaulle and his troops all reside in the Valley of the Gods, which prompted the question: “where are the gods?” Then I came upon the Lady in the Bathtub and was
really
puzzled.
That's
the Lady in the Bathtub?! Turned out my perspective was wrong, as I had driven in from the west. I needed to go a little farther, and a little further around the bend. There she was … a Cedar Mesa beauty luxuriating in a Cutler bathtub.More interesting to me was the curious feature in the rock layers near the base of her bathtub – this is the geo-challenge (I have no answer at this point). These are typical lower Cutler beds, with alternating layers of mudstone, sandstone and limestone. Was there a depression in the surface where the sand and limy sediments were deposited? Or was the underlying layer deformed later? Any modern-day examples?
Sources
(in addition to links in post)
Fillmore, Robert. 2011. Geological evolution of the Colorado Plateau of eastern Utah and western Colorado. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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