Ian Saginor over at Volcanoclast is hosting this month’s accretionary wedge on the topic of countertop geology. As with many wedges, the geoblogosphere has largely decided to ignore, well at least modify, the brief (probably because we mostly have laminate counter tops). Fortunately, Ian has kindly expanded the topic to include any rocks ‘as long as they’re decorative and completely detached from their origin’.

Unusually for me, my example is a palaeontological offering. This is the centrepiece in the foyer of the wonderfully named Hotel Kasbah Meteorites, in Southern Morocco.

The hotel / kasbah is close to the Berber town of Alnif, famous for it’s trilobite fossils. The hills around Alnif Djbel Issimour are called the trilobites mountains and trilobite sellers line the roads like fruit sellers do in other countries. The hotel owners decided to go with the geology motif with highly fossiliferous bathroom surrounds (edit: see below) and this centrepiece of large ammonites and orthocones.

I have a traditional Berber scarf from the rack in the background that I sometimes wear, much to the befuddlement / amusement of my students in the field.

[update:]

The ammonites and orthocones also appeared as a drinks table in a hotel in Ouarzazate that we stayed in on the last night.

Returns to grading gaol …

… with a deep [pressure solution] cleavage

for accretionary wedge #37

Garnet Hornblende Garbenschiefer from Lukmanier, Switzerland.

Almost thirty years ago I was fortunate enough to undertake my undergraduate geological mapping work for my degree dissertation in the Passo del Lucomagno / Lukmanier Pass region of Ticino, Switzerland. I have already talked about some of this in Accretionary Wedge #27 “Important Geological Experiences” and Accretionary Wedge #11 “Field camp”.

Google Earth view of my undergraduate mapping area at Lukmanierpass.

The topography, quite naturally for the Alps, was fairly severe, the campsite where I was staying at Acquacalda was at 1800m, the top of the ridge to the south was 2600m, and I had to descend 100m from the campsite before starting to climb up the other side. When working on the southern ridge it would take a couple of hours to walk up to the base of the ridge. I would then eat my lunch early, leave my rucksack and, travelling light, start to work my way up the side of the ridge carrying just my mapcase, notebook and compass-clinometer. I would spend the rest of the day working upwards until about four in the afternoon and then rapidly descend back to the campsite, collecting my rucksack along the way.

The south ridge of my mapping area from the campsite at Acquacalda

After about three weeks, about halfway through my stay there, I was working up to the south ridge. I had already ditched the rucksack but collected a fair sized sample of high-grade gneiss. I was crossing a boulder field and noticed an interesting looking exposure up a steep face to my right. I put my notebook down on a rock, placed my map case on top of it, and my gneiss sample on that to stop it blowing away. I then headed up to the steep outcrop with my compass-clinometer thinking I could easily remember a couple of readings and rock details and return to record the information in my notebook. At the exposure I took a couple of structural readings and then noticed that the rock structure looked even more interesting up and to my left. I traversed across and took another three readings, committing all five to memory.

I then turn round to return to my notebook. To my horror all I could see was a large boulder field. Although I had a luminous yellow field notebook, I had placed a grey map case on that, and then a large rock on top of that. They were perfectly camouflaged. I descended to where I thought I had left them and still couldn’t see them. I started to hunt for them. After an hour a mild panic started to set in. Had I just lost three weeks work down to my own stupidity? Since I knew that they had to be in the boulder field somewhere, I decided that the only solution was to criss-cross the boulder field in a grid search.

After another two hours without success, time was beginning to run out. As I was mapping alone, I had an agreement with the two others I was camping with and who were mapping adjacent areas, to meet up at 5pm. In the case of one of us not being there at that time, the other two would go out to look for them in case something had happened to them. I was going to have to give up soon to make the rendezvous deadline. My map and notebook could be ruined by weather if I left them out, even if I returned to find them the following day.

I decided to do just another couple of passes. And there they were, right in front of me, I practically walked into them. I was so relieved. I realised I was only 10m from where I thought I left them in the first place. I went back to that point and yes, I could see them from that point once I knew where they were, but the camouflage had been excellent. It was time to go back. But not before I had recorded the details of the outcrop including the five structural readings that had been burnt into my memory over the past three hours.

So, I haven’t ultimately left stuff behind on this occasion, but there is a follow up to the story. After my degree, I went to Cardiff to do a Ph.D. and I told the metamorphic petrology lecturer about the wonderful metamorphic rocks at Lukmanierpass, including hornblende garbenschiefer and kyanite schists that were so shiny you couldn’t look at them in the sun without sunglasses. I showed him the box of my rock samples that I had collected there. He asked if he could hang on to them for a while and I agreed. With the passing of my Ph.D. I completely forgot that I had lent him the rock samples. I moved on to Keele, and he moved on from Cardiff. I don’t know what happened to those rocks, but I do wish I hadn’t left them behind.

So, what do I go for? As I have been working on Staffordshire geology for several years and the county has coal fields in both the north and south of the region, I have come across several old mining terms in the literature and many are, I think, beautiful words that need recording before they are lost forever. For example, Baum-pot is hole left by the removal of a tree stump from extracting a coal seam below (or a calcareous nodule in the Halifax Hard Coal); Bibbley Rock is a conglomerate; Clod-tops are clays above a coal; Creeshy Bleas are nodules of bituminous shale which fall out when the coal is worked away from beneath them; Horse Beans or Shaggy Metal is a stratum of a granular structure immediately overlying rock salt beds; Quoiceneck is greyish black clay with shining surfaces; Rattle-Jack is a carbonaceous shale. There are several other lovely geological mining terms given in a previous blog post.

A little more common, but largely unknown outside of coalfields is Cleat or otherwise known locally within Britain as back and cracks, board-way’s course, hugger, nannies, reed, smooths, thread or veises.

Cleat: Image from Coal Seam Gas Exploration and Production Services http://csgexploration.com/Structural%20Geology%20and%20Tectonic%20Analysis.html

The origin of cleat is somewhat debated. It appears to be extensional in origin and therefore, in least in part, due to contraction in coal formation as the carbonaceous material is devolatilised. However, if this was the sole cause then it would be expected that cleat would form a hexagonal pattern, similar to columnar jointing. Cleat, however, typically forms a rectangular pattern, with two types of cleat at right angles to each other and the bedding planes. One set of cleat, face cleat, is dominant and through-going. The other set, butt cleat, terminates at the face cleat planes so must be later than the face cleat. The orientation of face cleat can be consistent over large areas (in England it is typically north-south) so must tectonically controlled (in this case by a regional east-west extensional stress field). It is thought that the butt cleat forms as a result of later uplift and exhumation.

Although cleat has been a largely ignored and somewhat obscure structural feature, its properties are gaining a resurgence with the advent of coal bed methane extraction. Dropping the pore fluid pressure in a coal seam by draining the water allows the cleat to open up and methane released from the coal can travel to an extraction well via the permeability provided by the cleat. The degree and orientation of cleat development can therefore strongly influence the productivity of CBM. As the cleat is well-developed in North Staffordshire we have high hopes for our own CBM project.

So, I nearly went with cleat as my favourite geology word, but I really have to go with something more local and Staffordshire in origin. The Staffordshire Coal Measures have, in places, been quite strongly folded during the Variscan Orogeny. Where a thin shale is over- and underlain by sandstones, the less competent shales can get quite strongly deformed by thrusting or flexural-slip folding. The black, carbonaceous shales get contorted, burnished, and highly slickensided and were locally known by the miners as Hussle. Where the shales were not carbonaceous the miners of the Staffordshire/Derbyshire moorlands called the rock Crozzle. I think that this has a wonderful local, rural ring to it, so that is my favourite geology word – Crozzle.

Notes:
Crozzle and Hussle are first described by the founding professor of geology at Keele, Prof. F. Wolverson Cope in:
Cope, F.W., 1949. Crozzle and Hussle. Geological Magazine, 86, 36-42 doi:10.1017/S0016756800074094

For a more detailed discussion of cleat see:
Laubach, S.E., Marrett, R.A., Olson, J.E. & Scott, A.R., 1998. Characteristics and origins of coal cleat: A review. International Journal of Coal Geology 35, 175–207

I extracted the geology relevant mining terms in a previous blog post “Do you know your crozzle from your hussle? from the following:
Gresley, W.S., 1883. A glossary of terms used in coal mining, E & F.N. Spon, London.

First, here is an exposure from last weekend’s Llangollen mapping course.

Folded cross beds and weird tafoni

Weirder still is the fact that the tafoni are not salt weathering related.

Second up, is something I put up for accretionary wedge 6 (things that make you go hmm – back in 2008) but I like it a lot so I’ll put it up again …

What happens to the orange sandstone and the faults?

You can see a wider view in the gigapan below.

This month’s accretionary wedge is being hosted by John Van Hoesen over at Geological Musings in the Taconic Mountains, who muses how geologists have incorporated geology into their homes, offices and gardens. My rock collection has been banished from the house and incorporated into an alpine rock garden at the front of the house, where a pocket-sized area on a steepish slope doesn’t lend itself to much else.

The beauty of having a rock collection like this is that it brings back so many memories of places visited and geology seen.

In this corner are the folds, including a flow folded rhyolite from Pembrokeshire, Wales and refolded folds from Loch Leven in Scotland. Behind are pegmatitic gabbro from Pembrokeshire, a gabbroic dreikanter from the Atacama desert from Chile, a water-lain tuff from the Lake District of England and a Welsh Old Red Sandstone conglomerate.

Here are a siderite nodule from Pembrokeshire, blue john from Derbyshire, England, larvikite from Norway and rose quartz.

Around the back, the acer has just come into leaf on the ‘pebble beach’. Most of the pebbles amongst the ferns and strawberry plants are actually glacial erratics collected from the local soil as we live on the edge of a glacial meltwater channel. They are mostly Triassic quartzite pebbles, but also include Carboniferous limestones and Lake District granites.

I’m late for this one and most of my geology photo archive isn’t on this laptop, so I’m going to go with something that I have to hand. This image is one of my gigapans (in this case a matrix of 16 x 6 photographs stitched together). It shows the foreshore at West Angle Bay, Pembrokeshire, Wales. The view looks westwards towards Milford Haven and shows the Lower Carboniferous Limestone contorted by a series of Variscan thrust related folds. One of the thrust planes is seen in the left of the image, over-steepened by the folding. To the centre of the image are a pair of whaleback periclinal anticlines. The beds then steepen again to vertical on the right via a tight syncline.

But the beauty of a gigapan image is that one can dive in and view the detail like the slickenside lineations on the thrust plane or the writing on the buoy.

I’m going to go back nearly thirty years for this one, to when I was looking for a PhD topic. In the UK in those days geology departments produced lists of potential topics which were submitted to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for approval. NERC would then provide a list of approved topics and a number of grants that they were willing to support, which was fewer than the number of topics approved. As a undergraduate student, one would apply for a particular topic, not knowing if it was actually going to be funded.

I studied for a degree in geology at Imperial College specialising in geophysics in my final year. In the list of approved PhD topics for University College, Cardiff (now Cardiff University) there was a project on “Geophysical Investigation of Small Scale Geological Problems”. This was ideal for me and I applied, only to receive a reply stating that this was one of the projects that they would probably not fund, but would I be interested in applying for a project on “Deep Earthquakes” instead. To be honest, I wasn’t that keen as I was more interested in doing practical, hands on, field geophysics but in order to keep my options open I replied saying yes. In retrospect, I should have gone for Cardiff’s other funded project which involved collecting and analysing palaeomagnetic samples from New Zealand, a place I’d still love to visit. However, after being rejected by Cambridge and Durham for other potential projects I travelled down to Cardiff for interview and to my surprise was awarded the PhD grant. I now had to find out about how deep earthquakes happened, something I had not heard about, certainly surprised me, and still baffles me somewhat today.

Shallow earthquakes are relatively straight forward. Stress builds up in a block of rock containing a fracture, whose two sides are held together by friction. Eventually the stress overcomes the friction and the two sides either side of the planar fracture move past each other, releasing the energy that had been stored previously as elastic deformation in the rock mass neighbouring the fault. The system of forces acting at the source is well known and described as a “double couple”. This gives (amongst other things) the classic quadrifoliate pattern of compressional and dilatational P-waves which can be used to work out the orientation of the fault causing the earthquake.

The model is fine for shallow situations where the rocks are brittle. However, the temperature increases by about 30° C for every kilometre you go down. In areas like California where heat flow is moderately high, by the time you get to about 15 kilometres down the rocks are too soft to deform in a brittle fashion and instead flow plastically. In intraplate areas like the UK where the heat flow is less, the brittle-ductile transition is just over 20 km.

In the shallow part of subduction zones, cold lithosphere is subducted and so cold, brittle material can be found at larger depths and earthquakes within the upper parts of the Wadati-Benioff are still explainable. Earthquakes in subduction zones tend to tail off around 200km down but in some start to reappear around 400 km and continue to the bottom of the upper mantle at 660km. It is these deep earthquakes that are particularly problematic as even in the heart of the subducted slab temperature will be well above the brittle-ductile transition. Brittle shear earthquakes simply can’t occur at these depths.

The depths at which the earthquakes switch off, on and off again (220, 410, and 660km) appear to correspond to changes in mineral structure due to the increased temperature and pressure with depth so this would strongly implicate mineral phase changes in deep earthquake sources. Down to 220 km the mantle is olivine + pyroxene [enstatite], from 220 – 410 km olivine + garnet [pyrope]. At 410 km olivine transforms to ringwoodite [the spinel form of olivine]. At the lower-upper mantle boundary at 660 km there is a further phase change to silicate perovskite (Mg,Fe,Al)SiO₃. Since the lower mantle comprises 55% of the Earth by volume this makes silicate perovskite the Earth’s most abundant mineral.

The task of my PhD was to investigate the source mechanics of deep earthquake to see if they had the same double-couple mechanism as the shallow earthquakes or whether they had a non-double-couple source and, due to mantle phase changes, to see if there was a volumetric change component to the source.

Most earthquake source mechanism determination was in those days, and still is today, undertaken using inversion methods which produce a best fit between the observed seismograms and synthetic ones calculated by computer. Some of the inversion solutions for large deep earthquakes had shown a significant non-double-couple component to their source, suggesting that the earthquakes may not be due to planar shear.

The technique that I was to use involved forward, rather than inverse modelling. It had been devised by my PhD supervisor for discriminating between natural earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. By making measurements of the amplitudes of certain phases (P, S and the near-surface reflections pP and sP) with error bounds, all the possible source types and orientations of those sources that are compatible with those observations are saved. By combining the compatible sources for earthquake records from several recording stations you end up (hopefully) with only a very small range of possible sources and orientations.

The image in the header shows P, pP and sP phases together with a rare S-to-P conversion from the lower-upper mantle boundary S₆₆₀P

It should be remembered at this time that digital waveform data was in its infancy and my earthquake seismograms were taken from analogue records. These were kept on microfiche in the basement of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh (next to the core store so it was always cold, even in summer). The correct microfiche had to be found for the right day, at the right time (decoding the time pips by eye – these are the white blobs next to the seismogram) at the right station, for the right component. The record was then blown up on a fiche reader and printed on a wet photocopier (so one finished up the day reeking of petroleum spirt). The earthquake data was also a minimum of two years old as it took that long to collect the records from the recording stations, copy them to microfiche and then distribute those copies. The contrast to today when I can watch earthquake seismograms from around the world on my computer desktop, pretty much in real time, could not be more stark.

Anyway, the upshot of the study was that I never found a deep earthquake that could not be explained with a non-double-couple or any significant volume change. They were all double couple, exactly like the shallow ones. Those earthquakes that had inversion mechanisms suggesting non-double-couple sources on closer examination of the actual seismograms revealed that they were actually multiple earthquakes with significant pulses of energy several seconds apart. I could analyse these sub-events and found that they were double couple but with slightly different orientations. This multiple shearing with different orientations was confusing the inversion solutions which at the time only used long period waveforms and could not distinguish the sub-events giving apparent non-double-couple solutions.

I could also use a similar method using the phase pulse lengths instead of the amplitudes to estimate the speed of the rupture and shape of the rupture surface. The up-going phases are much higher frequency than the down-going ones, showing a strong doppler shift. This means that the ruptures are travelling very fast, certainly faster than the speed of shear waves through the material. This is something different to shallow earthquakes, where rupture velocities supersonic to S-wave velocity are impossible.

So we have a geological conundrum. How is a material that should flow plastically accumulating enough stress to generate a magnitude 8.3 earthquake such as the one that occurred on June 9, 1994 636km beneath Bolivia and generates a shear mechanism indistinguishable from a shallow earthquake (other than perhaps by rupture velocity)?

There has to be some processes (probably involving mineral phase changes) that can cause some shear instability runaway condition that generates a supershear, rupturing at fast velocities generating deep earthquakes in a plastic material. What that process is uncertain, and something we may never know.

This work is over 20 years old and I’ve not been keeping up with the literature, so apologies if some/all of this is out of date. This was never written up other than in the PhD Thesis which maybe still available from the University of Wales

All three hundred deskcrop images can be found on my companion posterous blog and at my flickr site.

A google map with links to the geotagged images is embedded below.

View Rock365 in a larger map

Lockwood DeWitt at Outside the Interzone is hosting this month’s accretionary wedge where he asks “What is the most important geological experience you’ve had?”. The stress here is on the word important.

Picking the most important is incredibly difficult for me. I have been fortunate in my earlier career to have all sorts of important geological experiences, from climbing the summit of Mt Fuji in Japan to exploring the deepest wastes of the Atacama desert, from standing at the top of Monte Perdido in the Pyrenees to the bottom of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

However, the most important for me has to be my undergraduate mapping in Lukmanierpass, Switzerland because it was important to me on so many different levels. I’ve already covered this way back in Accretionary Wedge 11, Field Camp, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The first part of the importance is because it was a turning point in my life, the point where I grew up. Up to that point I had had something of a sheltered upbringing. I had not travelled abroad except for a “De la Beche Club” (the student geology society at the Royal School of Mines) cycling geology field weekend in Northern France, and I certainly hadn’t been abroad alone. There were three of us sharing a large frame tent in Switzerland, but the car could only take two plus the tent, so I had to make my way there by train. The Swiss railway system is incredible and runs to the second. It was the first time that I saw proper mountains. The metre gauge train from Göschenen at the northern end of the Gotthard Tunnel climbing up to Andermatt is an experience in itself. Travelling alone across Europe gave me the confidence to go to so many other places since then.

(Note: I’ve converted these to black and white because the older colour photos have faded badly)

It was also the first time that I had done proper independent mapping. Prior to this our mapping training was done as buddy pairs but here I was on my own. We wouldn’t be allowed by health and safety regulations to do this today, which is a real shame because it was a wonderful experience. It was just me against the rock. I had to sort things out for myself. It took me about four weeks to work out why in one part of the area the bedding/cleavage relationship was telling me that the beds were upside-down where as I knew from the stratigraphy that they were the right-way up. It was a struggle, but I cracked it – myself.

The geology was incredible. I’ve never really seen anything like it before of since. The sediments trapped between the internal and external basement zones of the Alps exhibit one of the highest metamorphic gradients in the world with one unit going from amphibolite grade (shown above) to sub-phyllite in just a couple of kilometres. Some of the faces with white kyanite acted a mirrors in the bright sunlight. You couldn’t examine the mineral texture without sunglasses.

My last day in the field was my 20th birthday. After almost six weeks mapping, I had just one last valley to map. And, halfway up the valley I found a rock that I was not anticipating to find. This has taught me never to assume anything where mapping is involved and always check everything out. I had to work very hard to sort out that valley’s geology because I had a train booked home the following morning. I returned to camp absolutely exhausted but ultimately triumphant.

Google Earth view of my undergraduate mapping area, from the lake to the top of the ridge in the middle distance. The foreground ridge by the lake is Precambrian external zone basement gneiss and the middle distance ridge is Precambrian internal zone basement gneiss. Between them is a sliver of highly deformed and metamorphosed Mesozoic sedimentary cover rocks.