Date Idea: 31/12/2014 - Doorway to Hell, Derweze, Turkmenistan

Nothing says "end of 2014" like fire!

Someone breached a gas field and set it on fire. I'd love to go see this. I suspect this'd make exploration drilling in the area quite tricksy.

Darvasa gas crater aka Doorway to Hell. Picture by Tormod Sandtorv, Image grabbed from wikimedia.

Places I've been - Jan Juc Marl, Otway Basin

Bioturbation // burrows in the Jan Juc Marl. A marl is a calcium rich mud and the Jan Juc Marl is early Ogliocene - early Miocene in age and is defined as a fine-grained silty glauconitic marl with sandy calcarenite interbeds which coarsens upwards.

 

My learned friend, Shannon Hurley, suggests these overlapping and diverging burrows are Chondrites. She proposed that the circular burrow (cross-section) pictured below my finger is Thalassinoides.

 

Ophiomorpha?

Date Ideas: 17/12/2014 - Canadian Rockies, Alberta, Canada

Many, many things to see here. Todays selection is glacial fed, Lake Morain in Banff National Park.

Lake Morain at Night by Andrey Popov.

Date Ideas: 10/12/2014 - Azul Macaubas quarry, Brazil (counter top geology)

I haven't seen this rock in person but the images I've found on the web make it a must see / must have. It seems to be a quartzite with a delicate blue colour introduced by dumortierite. The website that sells it is flash so not so good for getting images from however you should have a flick through their page (clunky though it is) - here. This is sold as Azul Macaubas, or sometimes Blue Marble. It looks best as large pieces such as bench tops. I think I need a bath made out of this, or a swimming pool maybe. Tiles would work beautifully as well.

I got the below image from here, and my structural geology brain went wow - look at those refolded folds!

Otway Basin - wildlife

As something a little different, wildlife seen while looking at sediments in the Otway Basin - at least the animals I was excited about seeing!

 

Tiny scorpion hanging out on the siltstone.

Echidna butt

Places I've ben - Eumeralla formation, Otway Basin

Last Thursday I took a trip to the Otway Basin with the Monash 3rd year sedimentary short course students. It was a lovely day and we saw some beautiful outcrops. The Eumeralla Formation is volcanilithic sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, mud-clast conglomerate, with feldspar and quartz grains, and coal: fine to medium grained, consolidated, well-bedded, cross-bedded; braided stream deposits. It was deposited the same time as the Inverloch sediments in a similar environment.

 

Faulting with minor offsets - sandstone with finer grained, organic rich beds

  

A scour filled with muddy rip-up clasts, some spotted this trip were up to 20cm wide.