Field trips - Billa Kalina in the Womera Protected Area

 Sunset in the South Australian desert during winter - cold but beautiful.

 
The Woomera Prohibited Area! 

I have recently completed a short field trip to the Womera Prohibited Area. This zone covers an area greater than England in the South Australia arid area. Still occasionally used for jet / missile (and things) testing, much paperwork is required to gain access. The company I currently work for has a couple of tenements in this area so my boss decided we should go up there and oggle the rocks. Given this area is in the Gawler Craton there weren't many rocks to look at, but we made the most of the ones we could find.

 A normal fault in some Bulldog Shale. The resistant layers are reinforced by gypsum and have been displaced by approximately 15 meters.

There were three of those pod like structures separating two different mudstones / weathered shales.  Below the main outcrop, slightly sandy and more resistant layers can be seen (near write-in-the-rain fieldbook)

In some sections of the pod, cross beds can be seen.

The edges of the pods show the bedding of the mudstone wrapping seamlessly around them. This + xbeds suggests to me that these are paleo-channels. The Bulldog shale is thought to have formed in shallow marine conditions during oceanic transgression.

Not on our patch, but we visited some Adelaidian sediments anyway. This hills were mostly composed of quartzites and conglomerates. Note the 6m high sand dunes in the middle distance and the lack of topography so typical of this area.

 Getting around is SO much easier when you have a Gator.