Liesegang bands in sandstone

Liesegang bands are poorly understood chemical structures often seen in rocks, especially sandstones. They were discovered more than a hundred years ago by the German chemist Raphael E. Liesegang, when he accidentally dropped a drop of silver nitrate solution on a layer of gel containing potassium dichromate, and concentric rings of silver dichromate started to form.

In sedimentary rocks, Liesegang bands appear well after the sediment has become a rock (that is, it got compacted and cemented). Stratification and lamination within the sansdtone are typically cross-cut by the Liesegang bands; fractures usually have a more obvious effect on the distribution and orientation of these.

The rocks shown here are turbidites of the Permian Skoorstenberg Formation, in the Karoo desert of South Africa. This Liesegang banding developed in the neighborhood of a small thrust and consists of brown bands of iron oxide that entirely 'ignore' the original lamination of the sandstone (not visible in the photos), but clearly like to precipitate along some of the fractures in the rock.

Images from South Africa: Landscapes

Follow-up from previous post: three landscape photographs, hot off the memory card, uploaded from a hotel room in Cape Town.

Karoo landscape

Table Mountain landscape

Cape Town landscape
In case you want to see more, the rest of the pics are here.

Images from South Africa: Flowers

I have spent some time in South Africa, mostly looking at turbidites of the Tanqua Karoo. One of course cannot refrain from looking at other things as well, apart from turbidites, so here is a taste of how the Karoo looks like after an unusually wet winter. Apparently there haven't been this many flowers in the last 40 years or so. The rest of the photos are here.

Hurricane sedimentology

Hurricane Ike knocked me off the Internets for a while, but things are slowly getting back to normal. I haven't been so close to - that is, in the middle of - a hurricane before; I have to say it was quite an adrenaline rush to hear and, to a lesser degree, watch the wind going by our windows with gusts of (probably) more than 100 miles per hour. In Houston, the damage was largely restricted to fallen trees and a few broken windows; fortunately not too exciting (see a few post-Ike photos over here). However, things are very different as you get close to the coast. Along the East Texas coast, the storm surge (unusually large for a category 2 hurricane) has shifted the coastline a few tens of meters landward, deposited lots of washover fans toward the lagoonal sides of the barrier beaches, and destroyed a large number of homes in the meantime.

It is worth playing the before-and-after game with the aerial imagery shot by the NOAA's Remote Sensing Division and made available in Google Earth. Here are a few screenshots from the Bolivar Peninsula.

Before:



After:



The light-colored lobes in the upper part of the 'after' image are the washover fans that in places reach the lagoon. Even more interestingly, there are some beautiful little fans built by the water flowing back toward the sea; for each fan, you can see the erosional 'drainage' area and little tributary gullies merging into a single large channel seaward, that turns from erosional to depositional as it widens. This is more clear in the zoomed-in pictures below.

Before:



After:



Note how some of the streets and roads that were perpendicular to the coast have become sites of preferential water flow and therefore locations for these channels.

Of course, all this cool sedimentology (I cannot wait to be able to get out there and have a closer look) also means that many-many homes have just become part of the stratigraphic record. These beaches and islands are the product of the interaction between storms like Ike, when large amounts of sand is eroded from the beach and transported offshore, and fairweather conditions, when sand has some chance to be deposited on the beach (if there is a large enough source of sand somewhere - usually not the case along most of the present-day Gulf coast).

The message should be already boring, but apparently it is not: these beaches and the barrier islands they create are geologically extremely active creatures, and in general it is not a good idea to build homes on them, certainly not right next to the beach. Hurricanes will be around for a while (and some experts say they are getting larger and stronger); and they are very good at creating large storm surges that are highly destructive on shallow shelves with low gradients, such as the continental shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Water escape structures in a Cretaceous delta, Wyoming

I spent a few days in Wyoming, at a conference and field trip focusing on clinoforms, organized by SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology). Clinoforms are sedimentary layers with a depositional dip of a few degrees that form packages of relatively large thickness (let's say more than a few meters; could be hundreds of meters in some cases. The point is that the foresets of ripples, sand dunes and other bedforms could be called clinoforms but they should not be). [Warning! - my definition]. After a couple of days of morning talks (many very good ones) and afternoon posters, we spent two additional days visiting some outcrops in southern Wyoming.

These photos come from exposures of the Maastrichtian Fox Hills Sandstone of the Eastern Washakie Basin, a sandstone of deltaic and fluvial origin that links through shaly clinoforms to turbidite sands and shales of the Lewis Shale, deposited in water depths of more than 400 meters (see reference below).


The photo above shows one set of smaller-scale clinoforms truncated by a cross-bedded sandstone unit above, probably of fluvial origin. This is a prograding shoreline. It was a matter of debate whether the erosional surface at the base the fluvial sands is a sequence boundary or not, and could be a blogworthy subject in itself, but I will refrain from discussing it here and now. What I think - at least visually - are more exciting are the water escape structures in the photograph below.


There are two sandy layers visible in the picture; the lower one is somewhat darker colored and more massive-looking than the upper one, which is more laminated and has an overall lighter color. The height of the rock surface covered in the photo is about 1.5 m.

A likely explanation for the structures is as follows (sorry for the arm-waving -- it would be nice to put some numbers here - sedimentation rates etc., but life is too short for that right now). Soon after the first (darker) layer was deposited, another flood of the river brought more sediment to this location, and started depositing sand, mostly along a flat bed that resulted in parallel lamination. The underlying sediment was still very porous and unconsolidated, and some of its pore water was trying to get to the surface as the weight of the overlying deposit increased. Thin layers of finer-grained and therefore less permeable sediment got in the way however; and the escaping pore water had to travel laterally until it found the most vulnerable spots to go again upward. There are two of these vertical water escape conduits in the photo. As all the water coming from the lower layer had to go through a limited number of these spots, the velocity of the pore fluid must have increased significantly, until it actually was able to fully suspend the sand it encountered. In other words, some of the sand along these vertical escape zones got fluidized and carried away. The white structureless patches of sand are sedimentary intrusions. The light color suggest that these sands are much 'cleaner' than the rest of the rocks; the finer grains (responsible for the darker color) were washed away.

One interesting detail is that the trough cross-bedded sand between the two intrusions thickens into the depression, suggesting that the water was trying to get out in real time, that is, at the same time as the upper layer was being deposited.

Below I linked in an amateurish-looking gigapan; and here is another post on water-escape structures.


Launch full screen viewer

Reference:
Carvajal, C.R. & Steel, R.J. (2006), Thick turbidite successions from supply-dominated shelves during sea-level highstand. Geology, 34, p. 665-668.