THE DYNAMIC EARTH: A BLOG ABOUT GEOLOGY AND THE EARTH SCIENCES

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Nifty stuff from the Utah Geological Survey

Hup! Just a quick post about this thing that I recently found. The Utah Geological Survey has made up some of them there KMZ files that the Google Earth Folks are so hyped-up about, letting you drape a 3-D geological map over the terrain around St. George, Utah. Pretty spiffy, really. They also have a virtual field trip that makes use of the crazy 3-D map, which is a pretty neat thing. All in all, a pretty cool use of the ol' Google Earth.

Anyway, back to work!

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Might as well post a picture, while I'm at it...

Since I'm in town, using that there internets to do my patented "Last Minute Abstract Submittal" to GSA, I thought I'd slap up a picture of some nifty soft-sed deformation. Here you go (in the words of the Prophet, "Click it, and it shall be Bigger"):



This picture is from some Cretaceous deltaic stuff exposed on the Rock Springs Arch, a little east of that shining beacon of metropolitanism, Rock Springs Wyoming. A picture of this very outcrop is in the "Roadside Geology of Wyoming", making it famous, I guess. That same book probably also tells you the name of the unit it's in, which escapes me now (I THINK it's Mesaverde Group, but I can't get any finer scale than that).

Anyway, you can see the nice folding going on in these slippery, mudrock and sandstone prodelta interbeds. If you look REALLY close, near the core of the fold, there's a little red stripe of something...that's my rockhammer for scale. The metal post on the right is a Speed Limit Sign, which is maybe 6 or so feet tall? So it's a good sizes feature. If you're every heading out on I-80, this outcrop is right on the westward-side of the interstate, a few miles before you get to Rock Springs proper. Take a look!