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Topics - OokieWonderslug
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1
« on: 07/04/2013 23:12:13 »
After much searching on Google I can not find any places where cave systems have been "de roofed" and are exposed in the surface. They should exist. But I can not find any. Where in the world are they? I am certain that erosion has uncovered more than one cave system, but where? I do not mean skylights, but the cave system itself. You know, stalagmites and all. Where ground level is now the level just barely above where the cave floor was.
Does this exist and if not, why? And if so, where?
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« on: 05/04/2013 15:18:05 »
I have read that the Carolina Slate Belt was once covered in Himalaya size mountains. If that is so, why are the rocks so soft? I saw a geology show where they were at the remains of the Grenville mountains and they were talking about how obvious it was that that area had been deeply buried by the weight of huge mountains. But then I read also that the peidmont of NC had equally as high mountains that eroded away. But if that is so, then why are the rocks here so soft? If you dig them up and set them out they melt away in as little as 2 years. They smash into powder when hit with a hammer. How did rocks that soft support 20,000ft mountains?
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« on: 05/04/2013 15:09:12 »
How much sediment is required to overlay loose windblown sand to turn it into sandstone? I have been told repeatedly that the sand in the NC sandhills was covered by sediments that then eroded away leaving no trace of the overlying rock whatsoever. Every case where I have seen windblown sand covered with sediments it was sandstone. Almost always there is very little overburden covering the sandstone.
So how much does it take?
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« on: 05/12/2012 04:12:20 »
We all know that the real color of the sky on Mars is a very pale blue, not pink or red as the liars say. Anyone who has fixed the colors of a NASA Mars pic has seen it. When you correct the colors so the sundial on the rovers is the correct color the sky turns blue. Easy to see.
But what I want to know is why does it have color at all? If you go on Earth to the altitude where air pressure equals Mars air pressure there is no color to the sky. It is black. At a far lower altitude than would equal Mars pressure the sky is black. There should be no color. Yet there it is. Pale blue. I know it is caused by Rayleigh scattering. And that makes skies blue even in a CO2 atmosphere. But how is there enough "air" there to cause any scattering?
And wind forms. How can such thin air cause sand dunes and wind erosion? How can it even hold dust aloft? We have no weather at 100,000ft, which is Mars equivalent air pressure. How can it even hold a cloud? Or make snow?
Are we being lied to about more than the color of the sky? Is it really much thicker than we are being told? Is it all just another method to keep the conspiracy nuts at bay? What's the deal?
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« on: 18/07/2012 14:41:04 »
As a former amatuer archeologist, I have dug many artifacts out of the ground. One can go down 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 years. I have never found an artifact on bare soil anywhere. Not even in a cave. They were always buried.
Yet when you look at geology, it is always assumed that great amounts of overburden has been removed. They say the Appalachians are eroding at 1 millimeter a year. Yet I have found spear points thousands of years old on ridges in the Appalachians under more than a foot of soil.
Geologists tell us that here in the peidmont we have lost 5 miles of overburden. 5 miles. The soil here is of volcanic origin. There HAD to be a volcano releasing this ash. Yet apparently there is zero remains of any volcanoes here other than the ash deposits and the pumice grains. Extruded lava is much more hard to erode than ash. Yet we have no huge piles of igneous rock that would have been a volcano.
This makes zero sense. Now they tell me that an area near here that has rhyolite and volcanic breccia was never eruptive. They say the only reason it has a higher elevation than the surrounding piedmont is due to uplift some 5 million years ago.
Please help me understand how you get rhyolite and breccia from an underground pluton. Please tell me how if things are eroding how come everything that is old is buried and not on top of the ground. To me it just does not add up.
Some will say that it goes in cycles and deposition is followed by erosion. But how long are these cycles? There are artifacts in south America 127,000 years old and they were all under dirt in a cave. The Carolina Bays are supposed to be some 80,000 years old and are still on the surface. Uneroded and uncovered. The Sandhills are supposed to exposed dune fields millions of years old. They are supposed to have been buried and then eroded out of the ground. Yet when sand is buried and compressed by overburden it solidifies and becomes sandstone. In the Sandhills the sand is still soft and not rock at all. If it was covered by 5 miles of rock it would not be so unconsolidated. There are fossil dunes in West Virginia. They are easy to make out. But they are rock, not sand. Sand is a rare thing to find in WV and even then it is a soft sandstone that has to be dug and crushed.
There is a layer of ash in the Marsailles shale in WV that has been mapped. It clearly points to a place in Virginia where there should be an extinct volcano. Yet there is no such landform where it should be. No where near it in any way.
I spent the better part of a day scouring Google to find outcrops of extrusive igneous rocks in the piedmont on NC only to come up with nothing. Not one study, not one report of anything.
If we are experiencing erosion like we are told, how come there is not one towering pile of basalt or rhyolite anywhere in NC? Even if there was extensive folding of the sedimentary layers (which there was) there would be a long ridge of extrusive rock somewhere given the differential erosion of hard magma and soft ash. Which there is not.
Please help me understand why this is like it is.
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« on: 29/06/2012 12:48:27 »
Ok, studying Google Earth shows that the east coast of the US had a different shoreline not too long ago. It is obvious that the ocean was 250ft higher than it is today. And judging by the lack of erosion in this ancient ocean bed shows it could not have been millions of years ago. Even with low altitudes you still get erosion and there is no relief past the 250ft mark. Further there are the remains of beaches at the 250ft mark.
So here is my theory: Before a new ice age starts ALL of the ice melts everywhere first. It certainly appears to me that the old shoreline is about the age of the start of the last ice age. What we see now is everything melting and blaming it on man. That is just silly. The melt off appears to be a normal part of the cycle.
Now I know some of you will try to claim that the beaches are from millions of years ago, But sand is soft and it erodes easily and there would be more relief if that was the case. Instead you have pretty much perfectly flat sand for 100 miles. The channels for rivers are not very wide. I measured one at 3 miles. That is not far for a river to meander in millions of years, but it is far enough for tens of thousands of years. Had the sand been buried and re exposed there would be more relief. There would be "islands" of harder materials that did not erode as fast and there are none.
Furthermore, if the ocean level dropped fast enough that would have left enormous areas of sand exposed to the elements and that would explain the sandhills and other areas of ancient wind blown dunes. But they ain't that ancient. They would have blown off the beaches and former seabed recently.
Ideas? Criticisms? Tell me once more why I am wrong?
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« on: 19/01/2012 04:29:53 »
In every reconstruction I have seen the Atlas mountains do not match up with the Appalachians at all. There should be a line of mountains on the west coast of Africa, yet there are none there at all. It is perfectly flat. How did Africa collide with America and not leave a line of mountains on both sides? What am I missing here?
It would be logical to think the Atlas were made by Africa smashing into Europe. They are in the right place and the area is in the process of colliding. If the African side eroded away, why are there still mountains in America when it has always had more rain and would seemingly have eroded away much faster than Africa?
What am I missing here?
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« on: 19/01/2012 04:18:03 »
I have read that the New Madrid rift is a failed rift. Then I read that it is still spreading at 1mm per year. I then did a quick calculation and found that at 1mm a year it is exactly as wide as it should be for it's age. So if it is failed, why is it still moving? And why is it as wide as it should be if it never stopped moving at that rate? Sure, it might be slow, but apparently it is still moving.
Granted, it is filling as fast as it is getting wider so it won't ever make an ocean.
But how can a continent that is being pushed at both sides be splitting apart both in New Madrid and in Nevada? How can it rift apart while being crushed together by both the Pacific and the Atlantic? Something smells fishy to me.
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« on: 12/01/2012 04:44:54 »
I have been searching for a better geology forum for a while now and have had zero luck. It's like geology is a dead science or something. I am looking for a fast moving forum with knowledgeable geologists on it who are willing to give detailed answers to my questions. I go out and see formations and want to know about them, but have gotten very little feedback when I post.
Probably most of all I need to know why I haven't found any gold in my creek. It is a rift valley, with basalt dikes and sills at the floor of the valley. There is ample quartz in the creek and gold has been found within 10 miles of here. I find mudstone, tuff, and argillite in the creek bed along with the basalt and quartz. The source of most of the quartz appears to be from a vein about a quarter mile up the creek. It should have gold in it, shouldn't it? It appears the quartz vein formed from hot water coming off the basalt as it cooled, but it may have been at the surface at the time since the crystals in the basalt are slightly bigger than salt crystals. I don't know for sure since there apparently is no guide and geologists seem to disagree on everything. So what's the deal with my gold?
And actually, where is a forum that has detailed answers and maybe more than 10 posts a day to read? I need more than "gold is where you find it and there is no reason why it's not there."
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« on: 10/10/2011 22:33:54 »
I have a geology book I bought that talks about all the interesting places to go in North and South Carolina. In it there is an article on 40 acre rock. This is a site near Pageland, SC that I have been to many times. I found one obvious mistake in the book about the site. That mistake being that they said that the pools on the rock are natural. I know they are not. They start from having a fire on the rock and that causes the rock to weaken and makes a dent in the rock and water can stay there and start the process of erosion. The pools all began as fires set by indians.
But farther along in the article it states that the flatness of the formation is due to wave action from when the ocean was much deeper. It flatly states that 40 acre rock was eroded flat from the action of ocean waves.
If that is true, then there has been no significant erosion there for 65 million years. The sand is all beach sand and not wind deposits. The area was not buried and re exposed. And previous threads about the origin of Sugarloaf mountain are not correct.
So is the book wrong? Why would they say that it was made flat by the ocean and not by what ever stopped this mass of granite from ever reaching the surface? I would think that what ever mass was dense enough to halt the upwelling of 30 square miles of molten granite would have lent a small amount to it's final shape when it solidified.
Clarification?
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« on: 22/09/2011 17:10:57 »
I read that miles of dirt have been eroded off the top of the soil here in the piedmont. Yet when archeologists dig artifacts they are always buried. 10,000 years is about a foot of accumulation. So if dirt is accumulating, how is it eroding at the same time?
Wouldn't artifacts begin by being exposed? How do they get buried if erosion is happening? I am sorta confused by this.
Things that are thousands of years old being buried is not what happens when you're shaving miles of sediments off a continent.
How do geologists conquer the paradox? Hopefully not by ignoring it.
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« on: 29/08/2011 20:29:45 »
I have a friend that has a well and her water has iron and sulfur in it. Ruins her clothes, but anyway, I have another friend who lives about a quarter mile away and her well water is pure.
Both are on a long, low ridge that starts in Badin, NC and ends about 20 miles to the southwest.
I have read that gold is found near where pyrite is found. And iron and sulfur are what makes pyrite.
Is it probable that my friend's house is sitting on a gold seam?
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« on: 20/05/2011 02:55:28 »
I recently went to Morrow Mtn state park and while I was there I noticed that the signs on the top of the mountain have been changed. They used to say that Morrow Mtn was a volcano 500,000,000 years ago. Now it says that it was a blob of magma that never reached the surface 400,000,000 years ago.
That begs the question. Where are the volcanoes? The sediments of the Carolina Slate belt are volcanic ash, mud, clay, and pyroclastic flow remnants. This means there had to be volcanoes. When I was younger and did not know any geology I thought that Crowder's Mtn, Pilot Mtn, and Morrow Mtn were all the remains of volcanoes. I have since learned that none of them are.
They had to be here, or the sediments would not be what they are. Having read over and over that approx 5 miles of sediment has been eroded away from the area, wouldn't that leave a magma pipe sticking out somewhere as a mountain? Wouldn't there at least be a mountain that was just a rubble pile of basalt? If there had been a miles long pipe of magma going to what was the surface at one time wouldn't it leave a trace? I imagine a huge pile of broken igneous rocks.
Or were the volcanoes on a lower level than the ground is at now and are still buried? How would the ash be here and the source be at a lower level? There are numerous plutons in the area that never made it to the surface. Why isn't there evidence of where they did make it to the surface?
Logically there should be at least one column of igneous material jutting up from the piedmont. Basalt does not erode as quickly as metamorphosed ash. Or clay.
There were never glaciers here to "wipe away" the bases of the volcanoes. They seem to be missing from the landscape. Why?
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« on: 14/05/2011 19:27:28 »
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=35.770032,-80.294732&spn=0.00222,0.005493&t=h&z=18I used to live within a mile of this spot. In the fall and winter it is extremely obvious that what we have here is part of a creek. A horseshoe bend of some kind. It's about 3 miles from the river and there is a small creek a mile away, but neither seem to be good candidates for having been in this spot at one time. Since it's a surface feature, does that make it young? It's orientation (going into and out of the hill it's against) makes me think that water feature was here and then completely buried and then this was eroded out of the hill. I have spent many hours looking in the area and this is the only place where this feature shows up. You can't connect it with anything else. Is the rest of this river buried? What would bury a river? Wouldn't the flowing water just wash what was covering it up away? What do you reckon I'd find if I could secure permission to dig out the center of this feature to the rock bed? Would there be fossils there?
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« on: 04/05/2011 18:07:48 »
The other day I went to place called "Sugarloaf Mtn" SC. It is an odd outcrop of iron cemented sandstone that protected a sand dune from eroding thus leaving a hill in it's place topped with this sandstone.
This site is confusing to me. Supposedly the Carolina Sandhills are a result of sand blown westward by winds forming a dune area that subsequently had vegetation grow over it and stabilized the dunes into hills.
If that is so, then where did the sandstone come from on top of the dune? How did it get blown there? And what caused it to cement together with iron in only that one spot?
And this is the biggie, how in the world did sand get anywhere and be so angular as this sand in the sandstone? It isn't the least bit rounded in any way. It is rough like it came straight out of a crusher. How does sand form without any weathering? Doesn't sand form when large rocks are broken unto smaller rocks through erosion (wind, water)? Doesn't this process tumble the sand until it is fairly smooth?
The sand under the rocks is smooth like it could be windblown or at least eroded out of some form of sea bed or whatever. But the sand in the stone is as rough as it can be. I can't figure it.
What I see when I look at the scene there is apparently impossible. What I see is a fossil sea bed and a completely rusted and decomposed ship that has had it's iron from it's hull slowly cement the sea sand together and then the sea went away, all the surrounding sand washed away leaving the remains of this ship (and it is a ship sized outcrop. About 1,000ft long, 200ft wide, and apparently about 50ft thick at it's thickest.) There are empty pockets in the rock and what looks like impressions of broken timbers and also places that look like it was crumpled steel at one point.
We all know this is impossible. The sea hasn't been there since the cretaceous period and there weren't any supertanker sized ships back then at any rate. But if that's so impossible, what other way is there to explain this outcrop? It is all alone out there in a sea of sand dunes.
But even if it was a ship, that still doesn't explain the roughness of the sand grains. How does that happen? The only thing I can come up with is the ship was carrying a cargo of crushed quartz and mica flakes when it sunk. But that's impossible.
So what's the deal with the sand and the lonely iron cemented stone all alone in the middle of nothing else?
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« on: 28/02/2011 21:45:39 »
I was in WV recently and came upon this hill. It had tan mud and sandstone blocks interspersed throughout. There was mostly tan mud. In the midst of this mud was a rock unlike any of the others around it. It was a sandstone, but not the hard, fine grained sandstone that is normal for this area. This sandstone was still sandy. And black! One large bowling ball sized black rock in a cliff of tan mud. I climbed up on the hill to investigate and the rock was extremely crumbly. A large part broke off in my hand. I then noticed that embedded in the rock were smaller hollow rocks. Lots of them. At first I thought they were fossilized nuts of some kind. But they were different shapes and sizes. Some broke apart upon touching them others seemed harder. I scraped away all the black sandstone and was left with a few marble sized rocks that are hollow inside. When I shake them I can hear the debris moving around. The broken ones had a little yellow mud inside. Most were empty.
I can't figure how this rock formed nor the hollow rocks it contains. Why only one black rock of this type there? Why didn't it form a solid stone when the sand above and below it did? Why was it embedded in a hillside of tan mud? How do you get random hollow stones inside a rock like that? When I first got them out of the rock, they had a metallic sheen to them. And there was what appeared to be some rust inside the black sandstone too.
The broken stones had a dark brown shell that was very fine grained. It came from a hillside in Princeton, WV where the sedimentary layers go from a 45 degree angle to level. In the level sediments. About 10 miles from the angled ones.
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« on: 13/09/2010 20:35:12 »
I read on geology sites that during the cretaceous period sea levels were as much as 800ft higher than today.
But other sites say that if both ice caps melted, Greenland and all the glaciers melted, the sea level would only rise about 250ft.
So where did the water go? Why can't we get another 800ft rise? That would be so cool. Where can we find enough water to deepen the oceans the other 550ft?
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« on: 10/09/2010 04:27:39 »
I have a creek that runs in back of my house. The creek bed is an ancient rift fault that is mostly filled with basalt blocks. On the hills on either side of the creek the rocks are tan volcanic slate, then a layer of small red rocks that are highly magnetic and hard. Then a layer of red clay with large white quartz nuggets dispersed randomly. There are softball sized quartz rocks in the creek bed along with the basalt.
My guess is that when the rifting occurred there were large cracks in the cooling basalt and water flowed through these cracks slowly depositing the quartz. Would gold have been deposited too? I have looked for nuggets (not found any) but haven't yet gotten around to panning. The mosquitoes are at plague levels and I am waiting on the first frost for that.
So, does that sound like a good area for gold? I am in the "gold belt" area of North Carolina and about 20 miles from Reed's gold mine.
Any idea on the origin of the small hard red magnetic rocks?
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