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- [REQUIRED] Please post a photo in your log of yourself or a personal item at the site to prove you visited the site.
- Which way do the layers tilt on the north east side?
- In some of the layers, you can see the cross-lamination. Describe what you see and how do you recognise it as cross-lamination?
The age of the rocks on Point Pleasant Park places them very near a major division on the geologic time scale, between the Cambrian and Ordovician periods. If Earth history were a novel, this new chapter would be full of surprising developments that change the main characters lives forever.
All though the Cambrian period, Gondwana and Laurentia moved farther and farther apart as the Iapetus Ocean opened between them. Avalonia, Ganderia, and Meguma all stayed near Gondwana. Early in the Ordovician period, though, the Iapetus Ocean began to close. The new Rheic Ocean opened in parallel to the south, carrying Ganderia and Avalonia away from Gondwana and toward Laurentia.
For now, Meguma stayed behind on Gondwana’s continental margin. With Avalonia drifting away, the sea covering Meguma became part of the rapidly widening Rheic Ocean. Gondwana was now the sole source for Meguma sediment, which long rivers carried farther and farther across the supercontinent’s worn surface. Turbidity currents kept tumbling and swirling across the sea floor, but the particles of sediment that reached Meguma became smaller over time.
Turbidites
Turbidites are formed by turbidity currents, fast-moving underwater avalanches of water and sediment. Each cycle of coarse-to-fine sediment represents the passage of a single turbidity current.
As a turbidity current races down a slope, the swirling water scoops out hollows and dents in the surface it travels across (usually fine-grained sediment from a previous turbidity current). New, coarse sediment then settles out of the water and fills in those hollows. The sculpted pattern remains on the base or sole of the new bed, resulting in a type of sole mark known as flute casts. They capture the very moment at which the swirling current passed by.
High levels of carbon (as graphite) give the shale its black colour, revealing the wavy contacts and variable thicknesses of some layers. Some irregularity could be due to a new turbidity current having scoured channels and hollow in an older mud layer. Also, because mud traps more water than silt does, it later compresses more when the sediment is buried and converted to rock. Some layers of shale were distorted between less yielding siltstone during that process.
Each underwater avalanche of watery sediment deposited heavier silt particles first, then much. Known as cross-laminations, they formed as the moving current created ripples on the surface of the sediment.
Cross-Lamination
Cross-lamination, or Cross-bedding, also known as cross-stratification, is layering within a stratum and at an angle to the main bedding plane. The sedimentary structures which result are roughly horizontal units composed of inclined layers. The original depositional layering is tilted, such tilting not being the result of post-depositional deformation. Cross-beds or "sets" are the groups of inclined layers, which are known as cross-strata.
Cross-bedding forms during deposition on the inclined surfaces of bedforms such as ripples and dunes; it indicates that the depositional environment contained a flowing medium (typically water or wind). Examples of these bedforms are ripples, dunes, anti-dunes, sand waves, hummocks, bars, and delta slopes. Environments in which water movement is fast enough and deep enough to develop large-scale bed forms fall into three natural groupings: rivers, tide-dominated coastal and marine settings.