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  2. What the Heck is Highly Allochthonous?

What the Heck is Highly Allochthonous?

By ksharpe on March 2, 2007.

Chris Rowan, a geologist, maintains a blog with a tongue-twister of a name. Highly Allochthonous is the spot where he blogs about geology, a subject he has found to boast "more field trips and more beer" than his first love, physics. Chris is based in the UK and currently beginning a postdoc at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He also writes a column about the life of a postdoc for Naturejobs. And the blog name—?

An allochthon is a sequence of rocks which has been superimposed by faulting on top of another sequence which it was originally a large distance away from; for example, a sequence of sediments which were originally deposited in the deep sea, and have then been thrust over shallow marine or continental deposits of a similar age.

There, didn't that make sense?

Well, never fear. Keep on reading Highly Allochthonous, and it will.

i-ae3647026da1150625d59b9bc0e9196a-geology.jpg

Bronzitite photo by Kevinzim, from Flickr.

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