Monday, April 25, 2011

Hopeless geology

I very much like geology. I have read many books including Earth by Frank Press and Raymond Siever which is a study book at the academic level. But out in the field I'm unable to interpret anything. It is clear that reading books is not sufficient. You need a guide to explain things in situ.


Take this for example. On a walk with my father I came across these concretions. They are tiny, a few centimetres at most.

I think it is dissolved limestone that precipitates in this manner, like horizontal stalactites. Maybe this happens because the area is often covered by snow and ice. Today these parts are bare but until 1860 they were under the glacier. It is plausible that they were formed by water flowing between the glacier bottom and the rock. A kind of horizontal flowstone.

Unfortunately I did not measure the direction and slope of the formations. Bloody amateur!
Location:
Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Les Diablerets - Google maps

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous15 May, 2013

    Maybe a combination of stalactites and slickenslides, due to secondary precipitation within a fault surface

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  2. Thanks! That sounds very plausible:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slickenside

    ReplyDelete