Introduction
One of the nice things about gaining a little geological knowledge is when you spot something out of the blue, going about your everyday business and can say to yourself aha - I know what that is! 
That's what happened to me the other day while walking past a local pub. The irony is that I'd seen what I still think is another example of this phenomena a few days earlier, but had been unable to get close enough to get a good look at it or even a decent photograph with the poxy camera on my Android
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What I saw was some really nice examples of Liesegang banding and the cache name is really just a little play on words which doubles up as an aid to pronunciation
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There are plenty of other sandstone buildings in the village and a couple of days later I noticed that the former church down the road had some good Liesegang features, as does the cladding in the shop across from the pub (especially the side facing Park Road) and hence this EarthCache involves visiting three locations rather than just one - but they really are very close together, so you won't need to walk too far
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Logging Tasks
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Based on your study of the the stone used to build the walls / cladding at each of the locations and using the information on the cache page please tell me:
- At which of the three locations is the bedding most visible in the stone?
- Which of the three locations features the most tightly bunched Liesegang bands? Look for lots of parallel bands all running very close to each other - whether they be straight or curved.
- Do any of the locations display Liesegang rings? Remember - the bands must form a completely enclosed loop / circle.
- Describe any of the locations display Liesegang patterns with sufficiently high concentrations of iron oxide that weathering and erosion has left them raised above the surrounding rock?
- Optional task: feel free to add any photographs of your visit that do not show the specific features from the logging tasks - no spoilers please. In the interests of allowing everyone to experience the EarthCache fully for themselves obvious spoiler photographs will be deleted.
Background
At the given coordinates you will find yourself standing outside a public house constructed of sandstone with very visible and attractive bands of distinct shades of oranges and browns.
These bands get their colouring from the ferrous minerals they are made up of - namely oxides of iron, or what we might commonly identify as rust.
Sedimentary rocks, like this sandstone, are made up of rock fragments (sediments) held together by mineral cement. In this sandstone the cementing minerals are oxides of iron. What's special here is that by some process the minerals have become concentrated and arranged into regular repeating patterns - numerous parallel bands in this particular rock. There's some debate within the scientific community about precisely what this process involves and exactly how these patterns arise but it is generally accepted that they form not during the original deposition of the sediments but at some later point in time and it is hypothesised that repeated cycles of wetting of the rock due to variations in groundwater levels have a part to play - and something called the Ostwald-Liesegang supersaturation-nucleation-depletion cycle - but we won't go into that
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The other two waypoints given are for a former church, where you should pay particular attention to the areas around the windows and doors, and a retail store (sadly recently and suddenly closed) which includes Liesegang features in its sandstone cladding.
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Bedding planes - sedimentary rocks are made of fragments of other rocks called sediments, stuck together by mineral cement. Unsurprisingly, the sediments in sandstone are sand-sized grains - which makes them easy to see with the naked eye
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Because the sediments are laid down under the force of gravity they tend to settle in horizontal layers called beds. Beds are made up of sediments of roughly the same size and type. If the size and/or type of sediments being deposited changes distinctly a new bed is formed. The interface between beds is called a bedding plane. Sometimes the beds and bedding planes are easy to see, but sometimes they aren't so clearly visible.
The image to the right shows a section of sandstone in which the beds (layers) and bedding planes (darker bands between the layers) are clearly visible.
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Liesegang bands - occur naturally within many sedimentary rocks - like sandstone for instance. They can occur in igneous and metamorphic rocks too but this is far less common.
The most basic form is one of parallel bands of oxide material which tend to vary between light and dark and for this reason Liesegang bands are often misinterpreted as beds / bedding planes but one of the characteristics of these bands is that they ignore existing bedding - but they often concentrate / intensify around joints and cracks in the rock.
In the image on the right the ribbon of narrow bands remain parallel to one another while forming flowing curves which bear no correlation to the rock's original bedding.
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Liesegang rings - it should come as no surprise at all by this point that Liesegang rings are just Liesegang bands which form an enclosed loop (or ring, obviously
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Rings may form as nice, regular, concentric circles but that needn't be the case, rings of all sorts of shapes can occur. Where the rings are circular though they can easily resemble tree rings in appearance and we might even be forgiven for thinking we're looking at fossilised wood rather than rock
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We might also be forgiven for thinking, when presented with concentric rings and knowing that rocks form in layers, that we're looking at circular layers of rock which somehow grew out from a central point - but that's not the case as we know that the rings developed long after the layers of sediment which make up the rock were laid down horizontally.
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And so not to bed - Sediments and sedimentary rocks are characterised by bedding, which occurs when layers of sediment, with different particle sizes are deposited on top of each other. These beds range from millimeters to centimeters thick and can even go to meters or multiple meters thick - which is one reason why it's not always easy to see the bedding in the relatively small scale pieces of rock used to construct buildings.
The image to the right though does clearly show a mostly vertical Liesegang band cutting across all of the horizontal beds in the stone - just so you know what it looks like
. It's not the best photograph in the world but the spot I took it in was fairly shady.
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Complexity - So far the examples given have focused on simple forms of Liesegang patterns but the phenomena is not limited to simplicity and can in fact result in considerable complexity in terms of shapes, sizes, colour variation and the subsequent impacts on the rock surfaces of weathering and erosion.
Darker bands indicate higher concentrations of iron oxides which in turn make those parts of the rock harder than areas with lower oxide concentrations. This often results in the surface of the rock being sculpted by weathering and erosion as the softer parts are worn away while the harder parts are left behind, which can turn a flat stone face into a miniature 3D landscape.
If you've carefully read and digested the information from this cache page your tasks at the cache location should prove relatively straight forward, although you may wish to take a printed copy of the page with you so that you can check your answers while there
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Please submit your logging task responses before posting your log.