Tag: tuff

geology minerals north america

Shining hill in the Arizona desert

Deborah Painter (USA) In the area east of the small community of Bagdad and on the northeast edge of the Arrastra Mountain Wilderness of central Arizona in the USA, my friends, Terril, Yvette and David, stood with me at the base of a vision in the desert of a rockhound’s dream. This was a colourful, irregularly shaped hill, standing alone in the arid wildlands, its bright whites, reds and greens standing out against a blue and white March sky. The entire hill seemed composed entirely of loose stones of quartz, caliche (a mineral deposit of gravel, sand and nitrates found in dry areas of the USA), basalt, travertine, green quartzite, tuff and gabbro. One whole side of the hill was white from quartz. We had attempted to climb this amazing thing. But, like wonderful things in a dream, most of it eluded us. We could climb but a metre or so, before we slid back down, unable to secure a foothold. However, the four of us collected about a bucket full of the rocks on this Bureau of Land Management land. Fig. 1. Our eyes were transfixed by a shining green, brown, red and white hill (a volcanic neck), standing alone in the Central Highlands of Arizona. The side facing east (to the right in this photograph) was white from quartz. (Credits: Deborah Painter.) Just across the roadway to the south, we had hiked a short distance across an arroyo (a Spanish word for a dry creek or stream bed). … Read More

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england fossils geology minerals palaeontology

What’s so special about South Devon?

Professor John CW Cope (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff UK) Take a trip to the South Devon coast around Easter time and you are bound to come across student parties from universities engaged in fieldwork. What is it about this area that makes it so popular as a centre for this? The simple answer lies in a single word — variety. There is probably no other area in the UK where such a wide variety of rock types and ages is well-exposed in such a small geographical compass. Let’s have a look at some of the factors. The geological succession The oldest rocks exposed in South Devon are of Devonian age and, unlike many other areas of the UK, the Devonian rocks are in marine facies virtually throughout. Looking back over the history of geology, the age of these rocks had initially proved difficult to identify and it was only after Murchison had seen the marine successions in The Rhineland and Russia that he realised that these marine rocks were the equivalent of the Old Red Sandstone farther to the north. The Devonian rocks present a variety of marine facies, with the Middle Devonian limestones being of particular note. The limestones are a local development whose presence, in an otherwise deeper water succession, is due entirely to local shallowing of the water caused by thicknesses of volcanic rocks extruded along extensional fault lines as the local basins developed. This shallowing allowed reef-building organisms to flourish and the principal ones of … Read More

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