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Highly Allochthonous

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You're not missing much Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, he is now a post-doc at the University of Johannesburg.

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« Should I be linking to you? | Main | Into the Bushveld #2: 'Look at the size of that thing!' »

Layer cake stratigraphy

Category: bloggerygeology
Posted on: February 5, 2008 7:30 AM, by Chris Rowan

Brian might not like it, but I think this t-shirt is pretty cool:

zoom.gif

(via the Livejournal community)

Comments

oooh...I do like it...i might have to get that

Posted by: BrianR | February 5, 2008 10:27 AM

What on earth are those clastic dikes doing looking like that?

Posted by: Maria | February 5, 2008 11:55 AM

Ok, so 'splain to me how you get an inclined-layered sequence sandwiched between two horizontal-layered strata.

Posted by: Divalent | February 5, 2008 4:51 PM

I've had that shirt since its first print a couple of years back. It's always inspired jealousy among my fellow geologists.

It's also a great conversation starter since no one has yet found a reasonable way the inclined sequence could be place between two horizontal strata. The best I've heard is the inclined layers slumped on a very shallow incline over the flat and were then eroded. But even that is pretty far fetched.

Posted by: Chris (goodSchist) | February 5, 2008 7:32 PM

Maybe the horizontal layer below the tilted beds is a shear zone, and everything further down is pseudo-stratigraphy. And that one layer partially melted to make the dikes. (Which would mean... very radioactive chocolate, or something?)

It's a core complex with an unconformity on top of it.

(Or maybe it's another volley in the jelly sandwich vs creme brulee argument.)

Posted by: Kim | February 5, 2008 11:16 PM

It's geofantasy! You know-- What you come up with when you have to have the cross section done by class at 8 am and that dang QC (quaternary crap) is hiding all the outcrops... :-)

mmm... chocolate geofantasy... I think I must make this shirt mine... :-)

Posted by: Jeri lynn | February 14, 2008 5:02 PM

From Massachusetts, the land where stratigraphy often needs "tectono-" placed in front of it to make it make sense...

The T-shirt is indeed very cool, and I want one! However, to play devil's advocate, it's painfully obvious that the whole section represented is on the overturned portion of a large nappe-structure, with the tilted layers representing the eroded remnants of the overturned limb, and the layers below unconformably laid on top. The top-most layers in the current stratigraphy are merely a weathered decollment (sp?) zone. The whole sequence was flipped into its present orientation by a secondary back-thrusting event, then baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes... How's that for geo-fiction?

Posted by: Joe | February 15, 2008 11:58 AM

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