This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (67 messages)
Why do the Applachians have to be pre-Cretaceous? Good question. I believe that there are undisturbed Cretaceous sediments actually impinging on the mountains in the South, but that would only date the mountains in Georgia and Alabama. There's a (very) little Late Eocene in Vermont that seems to postdate the…
>> >> Has there been any drilling and cores taken in the Hawaiian Islands? >> Probably, but I do not know of them. Wake me up when Mauna Loa spits out a piece of continental crust… I gather volcanic eruptions are liable to bring up occasional stray chunks of deep…
>>>The Ouichita/Marathon fold/thrust belt in Oklahoma and Texas is Late Permian (Wolfcampian/Leonardian) in age.
The island(s) that will eventually be created from the California(s) coast(s) isn't necessarily going to be in the middle of anything. It's caused (apparently) by a continent enroaching on a plate that is rotating with respect to another. So what seems to be happening is that a sliver of land…
While I think that much of the theory about the creation of the Applachians is probably correct, I also think there are an awful lot of inconsistencies and things that need to be explained better than they are. It sort of annoys me to see probable facts that are supported…
I understand the hypothesis, I think. I'm a little hazy on where the original Taconics were and whether there are modern traces, But it's quite clear from the sediment sequence that there was a land mass to the East of New York in the Upper Ordovician, so I'll take that…
>>>Until, of course, there is deposition on top of the stubs, as there is already in GA and AL where the southern range disappears under the Mesozoic. Should that area ever be uplifted and subsequently eroded, newly re-exposed faults and folds will once again provide relief.
If current trends continue, in a few tens of millions of years there will be a 2000 km long Island Arc in the North Pacific — the present California Coast from Drake's Bay South plus Baja California. It will contain some Paleozoic rocks — much metamorphised and hard to date…
>>>True, it is. All I know is that three different texts in my library agree that the modern Appalachians are the roots of the ancient mountain ranges, mildly uplifted in the Cenozoic by isostatic adjustment and/or epeirogeny.
All of what you said seems reasonable to me except the erosion of the Applachians. The modern Applachian chain is very clearly a folded structure. The Easternmost fold — Blue Mountain — stretches for many hundreds of kilometers broken only by the occasional water gap. To further complicate things, one…
Sorry — don't know a thing about the Pacific plateaus. As I understand it, continental rock is very light and doesn't get sucked into subduction zones. That's how all those exotic terrannes John McPhee )"Assembling California") writes about got tacked onto the West side of Northern California.
>>>The Rocky Mountains formed after the Atlantic opened; I think the Andes did too, as did Japan and all those Pacific islands that have volcanic origins.
>> I dimly remember something about some seafloor-rock trapped in the Appalachians. If there are pre-Carbonifereous fossils east of the Appalachians, I expect them to match African counterparts better than other N. American.
Kamron Those undersea canyons are well known. I'm not sure that they have ever been adequately explained, but a lot of ink has been spent trying. The upper parts of some of them are clearly erosional from the lower sealevels at the time of the recent glaciations. The lower parts…
Sandstone is, or at least can be, a rock depending on how well cemented (indurated) it is. A lot of it is marine. That highway in upstate New York was NOT built in the Devonian. It was created at 3:06 am (EDT) August 22nd, 2043BC along with the rest of…
Try your local library. I used to travel a lot on business, and If I had free time on a weekend, I'd do a little fossil collecting. The reference and general sections of the local libraries invariably have some USGS/State/ University geologic pamphlets that describe local formations, commercial geology and,…
>>>I _think_ (but am not at all sure) that they mean if you start at point A and head for point B 96km away, and navigate only by a GPS system, you will wind up at point B with a maximum error of 1mm plus or minus.
I don't think they are going to have any problem proving that the Adirondacks are rising (in fact, I think that's known data). The problem is going to be separating rising due to "hot spot" thermal pluming from glacial rebound, that's known from Holocene marine fossils in the Champlain Valley…
>>>How may I find out if there is a fault running off my backyard? The only one I know of nearby is the Rose Canyon fault along highway 5.
I'm inclined to agree that petroleum is biological in origin. About the only problem I'm aware of with the theory is the absence of known petroleum sources in Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian sedimentary rocks. There's lots of evidence for abundant life in those rocks, but, so far as I know, no…
Having a home generator is all well and good, but you do understand that you need to have a provision for disconnecting your house from the power grid when you fire it up? If you don't, you will end up trying to provide power to the entire blacked out area.…
I believe that there have only been about half a dozen dinosaur bone finds in California. The two best known specimens — a couple of bones from marine rocks at La Jolla, and a more or less complete Anklyosaur from similar rocks in Carlsbad are on display at the Museum…
>>>All rivers follow these faults. All the canyons were large cracks that opened up in the crust and the rivers just follow the natural lowest points.
My mom has been stashing batteries in her freezer for about 40 years without problems, and I've done it myself for about 10. They work fine even before they "thaw" although they are a little weak at first. I doubt they actually freeze as the moisture inside them has an…
>>>Your mention of $10 batteries suggests another ingredient for a quake preparation kit – they will need replacing in the kit every so often…
It sounds like you've run into quartzite — a sandstone with the grains tightly welded to each other. That stuff is usually very hard, but brittle. If I were you, I'd contact a local geologist. He/she should be able to figure out where you are in the geological column, what…
For what it is worth Radio Japan several years ago carried stories about the controversy in Japan when a French politico on a visit that in France they had rabbit hutches built better than most Japanese houses…. One wonders what the frenchman would think of modern american housing. (Probably die…
There's a fairly nice museum at the La Brea Tar pits. I enjoyed it. My seven year old was bored stiff. Aside from that, there's not much to see.
I thought Alberta had draconian fossil collecting laws. Have they changed? Or are they merely not being enforced?
Lanny I've been out of touch with the satellite business for decades, but I did work with satellite tracking in the 1960s. I know that enormous advances have been made, and they need to have been, because in the 1960s we didn't know where ANYTHING was to 50 meter accuracy.…
You can buy carbide impregnated blades for a hacksaw, and they will cut thru a geode. But it will be a lot of work, and your student's father won't want to do it very often.
Lanny Is there any chance that your topo map is just plain wrong? When the State of Vermont did it's own Geological mapping in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the state geologists commented repeatedly on the gross inaccuracies in the USGS topo maps they were trying to work…
Gary I'm in my 50s, so I guess that qualifies me to give unsolicited advice. Unless you are a very unusual person, you ought to do the following. 1. Learn a "trade" — plumbing, engineering, medicine, whatever. Something you can do well that will put bread on the table. If…
collecting sites in nys
Message #158971
Chris New York, or at least the Mohawk Valley and the area West from Utica to Buffalo is one of the few places I know of where almost any rock outcrop is likely to be fossiliferous. (The other two areas that I can think of are the Cincinnatti Uplift area…
Kakatoa produced a fair sized hole. Back in the 1960s when ships were cheaper than planes, I took a ship from Hong Kong to Sydney that sailed thru the space where the mountain used to be. My faint memory is that it was 3 to 6 Km across (3 islands…
>>> know from books that fluorescent talc, tremolite, anthophyllite, and tirodite are mined in "Balmat, NY" and "Talcville, NY", but cannot find their precise locations in my world atlas. Is it near that Vermont talc belt mentioned here recently, I wonder?
>>>Not all things are in a glut. The lead and zinc prices for instance are being maintained at high levels… There was an interesting article in Scientific American a few years ago about ore deposits. I'm hazy on the details, but the bottom line was that some materials were deposited…
>>>I think that temporary glut has been around since the sixties, no? More like early 1980s!!! Worldwide demand has been down for a little over a decade, largely because all the major of industrial economies have had serious troubles at various times in that decade. How quickly we forget the…
>>>Exactly why should we subsidize their exploration, as opposed to all other US industry? Well how about because the current worldwide glut of basic industrial materials is probably temporary? Moreover, the US is not doing as good a job as most industrial countries of encouraging sustainable lifestyles. And of course…
>>>Without the USGS who is going to do the earthquake studies, the volcano studies, other geologic hazard studies, etc.? The answer of course is, no one. But my experience has been that reality has no power to influence political fanatics of any persuasion. I suppose that all those fuzzy minded…
USGS prices will probably go up substantially sooner or later, because eventually we'll have to deal with the fiscal mess that self designated "conservatives" created in the 1980s. And which Newt and his buddies are talking about exacerbating. Privatization is a possiblity and it's a safe bet that (barring a…
The State of Vermont publishes a lot of inexpensive geological reports, but the best single source I've seen is "Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire." — one of the "Roadside Geology" series If you're just looking for a brief summary, the Green Mountains are to some extent a Northern…
In addition to the relatively innocous explanations others have offered, there is also a possibility that some amount of that gentle hillside is getting ready to slide off in the direction dictated by gravity. I've forgotten the technical term — something involving "slumping" I think. I think it's uncommon, but…
If you don't get other answers to your question about details on any earthquake in asia, you might try looking up the 1932(?) Tokyo earthquake. Since it was a large quake in a major city, you might be able to dredge some data out of encyclopedias and good history books.…
Arthur — I don't know much about specific sites in Western Quebec. I just moved to VT (Essex Junction–near Burlington) a year ago. A long way away, but not THAT far. I can sometimes get a weak snowy picture from Ottawa on the TV. I have read a fair amount…
>>> What type of sites have you found them in? I've collected geodes from decomposed igneous rocks in California, and also a few quartz crystal Keokuk geodes which were formed in cavities in a limestone in Illinois and Iowa. I'm told that the geodes I collected in California were formed…
Kamron I can't genralize to all geodes, but I have collected a few in the field. What you find at the couple of sites I've visited is a bunch of globs of silica ranging from thin shells to solid lumps. I believe that professionals collectors check the density of the…
Physics was not, to put it mildly, my strong subject. When you get into the world of wave propagation, a lot of phenomena are wierd to outright bizarre. As I understand it, the signal won't propagate and won't "bounce" if all the dimensions of the "waveguide" aren't large enough to…
>> By the way, did you know that a walkie talkie will not work underground, even a straight shot in a mine level? Apparently the bounce of the wall manages to cancel the signal out. > This is a very interesting tid bit. Can you hear the on off click…
Sounds stupid, but try any roadcut or streambed in the area from about 10 miles North of US20 South to the PA state line. Most will yield some fossils. If you see a place where people have been digging in the roadcut, you know you'll find something of interest. The…
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