Sedimentary Basins Meme

Post a satellite image of your favorite exposed ancient sedimentary basin.

Criteria: Do you have a good example of an ancient basin exhumed and exposed which still retains its original geometry, with its basins margins and paleo-shorelines easily identifiable?

Here is mine. The mid-late Proterozoic Cuddapah Basin of south east India. White arrows mark the eastern margin of the basin.

Where there are sediments there must have been a basin. Over time though the original shape of the depression may get obscured mainly through deformation and formation of sucessor basins which may have a different orientation and shape.

The Cuddapah basin however was an intra-cratonic basin i.e a basin which formed far away from plate margins within thick continental crust. Later what was to become India was situated in the interior of Gondwanaland and this region did not experience any Paleozoic sedimentation. And much later Mesozoic rifting was far away from this region further preserving the mid-late Proterozoic basin shape.

The eastern margin did see deformation in the late Proterozoic. The relatively undeformed western margin is still one of my favorite places to visit with exposures of the prominent unconformity between the Archean granites and metsediments and mid Proterozoic basin margin conglomerates and coarse sands representing the earliest deposits.

Here is a figure which shows the location of the Cuddapah basin along with other sedimentary basins of India.

 Source: Geotimes

Leave a link in the comments section so I can keep updating this post with links to your examples.

This Summer's Reading List Meme

Consider this a geoblogosphere (and anyone else who wants to participate) meme. What are you reading or planning to read this summer? You can stretch it to the rest of the year if you wish.

Me ? ...Not in any particular order-

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America - David Hackett Fischer
A Farewell To Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World - Gregory Clark
Sand: The Never Ending Story - Michael Welland
The Horse, The Wheel and Language - David Anthony
Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne
The Logic of Life - Tim Harford
The Mountains Of St. Francis - Walter Alvarez

Way too ambitious, but let's see how far I go with this.

Leave a link in my comments and I'll be crawling through the geoblogosphere also to post a link list in a few days.

Science Books For Science Majors

Chris at Highly Allochthonous has tagged the entire geoblogosphere with this meme.

Here's what it is about:

Imagine: YOU are asked to assign a half-dozen-or-so books as required reading for ALL science majors at a college as part of their 4-year degree; NOT technical or text books, but other works, old or new, touching upon the nature of science, philosophy, thought, or methodology in a way that a practicing scientist might gain from.

Listed below are books that I would recommend. They made me think hard and long about science and its impact on people and society at large.

1. For Geology majors: The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester. One of those heroic stories where the reader starts rooting for a happy ending. This is the story of William Smith who in the 1790's embarked single handedly on a two decade old effort to create a geological map of England and against what seemed as hopeless odds succeeded. And oh... formalized the study of geology in the process.

2. The Limits of Science, The Threat and the Glory by Sir Peter Medawar. No one explained the nature, benefits and limits of science better than Peter Medawar. Immaculate prose, rigorous logic and sparkling wit. David Pyke in an introduction to his book writes:

Sir Peter Medawar was three great men. He was a great scientist, a man of great courage - and a great writer.

A lot to learn from his writings.

3) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. How can you major in science without reading this? A book on evolution that inverts our traditional view of life and leaves us a little bewildered but enthralled.

4) The Atheist and the Holy City by George Klein. Not very well know but has some of my favorite essays on science and scientists. Worth reading even if just for one essay, Are Scientists Creative? Klein is a well know cancer biologist and there are several other gems on science and human nature in this book.

5) Life Cycles by John Tyler Bonner. I love this little book. Organisms are life cycles and it is these life cycles that have been elaborated through evolution to form the diverse and complex biosphere. The book has the feel of a personal memoir, a "career in science" kind of a book, but manages to pack an intellectual punch as well.

I like Chris's choice of Paradigms Lost. But since he has covered it I won't add it to my list though I do recommend it as well.

100 Things I Have Done As a Geologist

Geotripper has started this meme. List out 100 things you have done as a geologist. The entire list is below with stuff I have done or experienced in bold. My explanations in italic.

1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier - Glacier National Park, Montana
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia)- Lurray Caverns in Virginia.
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. - Mid Proterozoic porphyry copper deposit, Malanjkhand, central India
8. Explore a subsurface mine. - Late Paleozoic coal deposits in central India Gondwana rift basins.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California). - Cenozoic ophiolite in Ladakh Himalayas
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).

11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) - Proterozoic central and south India.
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high

21. A fjord - New Zealand
22. A recently formed fault scarp
23. A megabreccia - Himalayas
24. An actively accreting river delta- Krishna river delta east coast India
25. A natural bridge - Deccan Basalts about 100 km east of Pune, India
26. A large sinkhole - Virginia, Florida
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river - Florida
31. The continental divide - Glacier National Park, Montana
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees - Cretaceous, Central India
34. Lava tubes - Deccan Basalts, West India
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back.
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.

41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing - Not in Wyoming, but seen classic columnar jointing at Gilbert's Hill, Mumbai (Bombay).
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck

52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity

61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain

71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress) - Himalayas
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado

81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.- Recent September earthquake near Satara, Maharashtra was just about 5.0
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) - Cretaceous south India, Ordovician S. Appalachians.
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse

91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game).
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century - Halley's comet 1986
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

Looks like I have a lot of ground to cover. Especially, what.... you geologist?, but....no....Grand Canyon?!!!!

A Collection of Geological Haiku

The Haiku meme I started some time back got quite a good response. I have posted below links to all the aspiring poets in the geoblogosphere who contributed. As I had hoped the meme mutated as it spread through the population of geologists. My initial rule of a reference to a geological time period was made more fluid and rightly so I think to a reference to the passing of geological time or a reference to a geological process. Bloggers also wrote short accompanying explanations and posted visuals too. That made for some imaginative and evocative verse.

If I have missed anyone let me know and I will update the list.

In no particular order:

• Bryan at In Terra Veritas
• Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment
• Lockwood at Outside The Interzone
• MJC Rocks at Geotripper
• JJ at The Ethical Palaeontologist
• Life Long Scholar at The Musings of a Life Long Scholar
• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress Related
• Dave at Geology News
• Short Geologist at Accidental Remediation
• Neat Rox at Neat Gemstones
• Chris at Highly Allochthonous
• Kenneth Clark at Office of Redundancy Office
• Sciencewomen at Sciencewomen
• Rob Clack at Dem Bones Dem Bones
  
• Suvrat at Reporting on a Revolution

To end this thread since climate change is the issue all of us are going to be grappling with over the next few decades some thoughts:

warm chill warm
a mere blip Holocene
until the big freeze

The Geology Haiku Meme

Announcing the Geology Haiku Meme

deep in a bioreef
a Permian story
calcite dripstones tell

Respond Geobloggers!

Rules: Three lines and a max of seventeen syllables. Use of kigo, which is the traditional reference to a season, may be substituted by a reference to a geological period. The use of kireji, which is a word that serves to give structural support to the verse is not widely practiced in English haiku, so you may give that a pass.

Leave a link in my comments section and I'll post a collection of Geology Haiku links soon :-)

See: A Collection of Geological Haiku