Accretionary Wedge #30- bake sale

Callan Bentley put out the call as seen here - Bake Sale


I was too busy to have time to bake something,  I decided to go with something that I had in the house - so I'm using a King Cake.  For those of you who don't know its officially Mardi Gras season (Twelfth night to Fat Tuesday i.e. Jan 6 to March 8 this year).  During Mardi Gras one of the traditions is to have a King Cake. The King Cake is in celebration of the 3 kings that visited Christ.  It is traditionally oval in shape to commemorate our journey through life.  The top of it is decorated with three colors: yellow for power, purple for justice and green for faith.  The tradition is to hide a baby in the cake.  The person who gets the baby, ie the first person to touches the baby as they cut into it when they cut their piece, is suppose to have the next party with another king cake.  That person then becomes king or queen for the day.  (In our house that means getting out of doing chores).
    The King cake tradition is a time for family and friends to get together and celebrate life. We have been to so many places with king cakes it seems like someone in my family is always getting one and we need to fulfill our obligation of passing it on. Because of the football end of season playoffs it was the perfect excuse to have a king cake at our house since we had friends and family coming over to watch the games with us. In fact because the games occurred over a couple of weekend we ended up having more than one king cake at our house. Here's more on King Cakes with Wikipedia.


So here's the first cake that was eaten with the baby hidden inside.

Typical King Cake

So now you are wondering where the geology comes in.  At one point I thought of considering it as a concretion, or a volcanic crater but decided against those.
The whole fun of the King Cake is finding the baby inside of it.
To me it always reminded me of the fun I used to have looking for fossils out in the field.  You never knew where you would find one and if you did what shape it would be in.  It was more the fun of finding the treasure than it was having it to add to your collection.

So I decided to wait until the baby was found in a piece and then take that picture.  I thought it would just be a baby in bread. A simple fossil in a uniform sedimentary stone.  But with King cakes they are made with different ingredients inside the bread as well as having the the baby hidden inside.  Some of the different ingredients I have seen used are: cream cheese, pralines, strawberries or as with this one -- cinnamon.  I wasn't expecting to get the geologic display that I did with these cakes.  Here's the first one with the baby found. It reminded me of purple mountains, and my structural geology class where we studied anticlines and geosynclines.

King cake with a baby in it.

I thought I should classify it as an overturned anticline  Here's the scan of the picture that was used in my structural text book to explain overturned anticlines.  Structural Geology, 3rd ed. By Marland P. Billings (1972)pg 46. It also reminded me of the picture that was used in the introduction of the book so I also included that picture as well.

Plate 7B. Overturned anticline, Panter Gap, Rockbridge County, VA

                    Photo: N. H. Darton,  U.S. Geologic Survey.

Structural Geology 3rd ed, by Marland P. Billings.

It also reminded me of a formation I saw last year when I went to the Sundance film festival, in Utah.
This is a picture I took on the way to the Sundance resort where we stayed at while attending the festival. Here's the link to the  Sundance Resort.  I think I took this picture from Highway 15  looking east to the Mount Timpanogos - Wasatch, Utah  but I'm not positive about this since I was riding on a bus.  It looked like a faulted geosyncline but not being able to get out and really look at it I wasn't able to tell for sure.

One cake wasn't enough and we had another one and here's the baby in the second one.  Again I thought of the same things as I did with the first.

My description of the King Cake,
Alluvial sediments are sitting on top of a mound, underneath there is a thin layer of mud mixed with ice/snow holding it in place.  Near the surface there is a cave in the sedimentary layer.  The formation has been under extreme heat and pressure resulting in an overturn anticline.  Embedded in the layers, fossils of the Homo sapiens variety may some times be found.

Finally when ever I look at King cakes I think of the song from the movie The Lion King - Circle of life.

Hosting Accretionary Wedge #29 - What geological features about your home do you love

This was originally at  "Ann's Musing on Geology and other things" that blog no longer exists and it has been moved here. 

I want to thank everyone that submitted something for this post.
Call For Post - Accretionary Wedge # 29
The topic is: "What Geological features about the area you call 'home' do you love? and what do you not like?"

There is no one ideal place to live and study all the earth processes that fascinates me; I have had to pick one place - settle there and call it 'home'.  Every place that I have ever lived and called 'home' for awhile has always had very interesting geologic features to it that makes it unique.  In Northeast Ohio it was the effects of glaciation, in Southeastern Ohio it was the Paleozoic Cyclothems exposed in the Appalachian Plateau, and currently I live on a bayou in Louisiana.  What is it about the area you that you now call 'home'  that is so fascinating to you. What do you not like?  Did you choose to live where you are because you love the geology of the region and just wanted to live the in the area or was there another reason that brought you there?


Each place that I read about made me want to be able to live there for awhile too so that I could explore and look at first hand what they posted.  I know I can't afford homes in all these places so I'm just going to have to settle for taking vacations  (hopefully a long one) in some of the areas.  I am going to start with the United States since that is where most of the post are coming from.

THE UNITED STATES
When I first thought of this topic I thought that I would list them by states, but then as I read the posts I realized that they should be listed by regions since so many of the areas discussed cover more than one state.  So I went and found one of my old Geomorphology texts called 'Field Guide to Landforms In The United States' by John A. Shimer (1972), his Geologic Provinces are:

1. Pacific Border
2. Cascades
3. Sierra Nevada
4. Columbia Plateau
5. Basin and Range
6. Colorado Plateau
7. Rocky Mountains
8. Great Plains
9. Central Lowlands
10. Interior Highlands
11. Interior Low Plateaus
12. Appalachian Plateau
13. Ridge and Valley
14. Blue Ridge
15. Piedmont
16. Adirondacks
17. New England
18. Coastal Plain
19. Superior Upland




 I must admit that I am new to hosting and am not very good with computers.  I want to make sure that I have it so you can access these submissions and have put in some redundancy to ensure you can get there.Please bear with me.

I just had a few submissions but based on what I had:

1. Pacific Border
     Jim @ Active Margin - writes about South Orange County  (http://jrepka.blogspot.com/2010/11/geo-tours-in-south-orange-county-san.html) Geo Tours in South Oragne County: San Onofre State Beach .    Here's some of the exciting things Jim likes about where he lives.
California is a geologist's paradise. In southern Orange County, opportunities for class field trips less than a half-hour from campus are abundant. A short drive up Silverado Canyon covers a significant fraction of the Mesozoic. We have world-class fossil beds in Mission Viejo with Miocene and Pliocene marine mammals and abundant shark teeth. Granitic mountains, active faulting, beaches backed by multiple marine terraces, Tertiary marine sedimentary rocks criss-crossed with recent andesitic and dacitic dikes, and the beaches are nice too...

For my geotour I present a basic outline of one of my class field trips:

 Here are a few of his pictures that I thought were so interesting




Look  to the blog to see the other interesting photo's about the field trip. To me this sounds like a very fascinating field trip that anyone interested in geology would enjoy going on.


2 + 1 Cascades and the Pacific Border-  
     Dana @ En Tequila Es Verdad - writes about Washington state (http://entequilaesverdad.blogspot.com/2010/11/such-civil-war-is-in-my-love-and-hate.html)  Such Civil War is in my Love and Hate
Dana starts out with: 
Simple answers to simple questions: love the variety, hate all the damned biology in the way.  Well, I only hate the biology when I'm trying to look at geology and when it's giving my asthma fits - apart from that, I actually love it quite a lot.


 She then expands with more reasons as to why she loves the geology in the area.  
Dana includes some awesome photos that make you want to go there to see for yourself. And here they are:

Mount Rainier Peeking Through Clouds and All the Damned Biology

Dry Falls

Tarn Near Sunset, Hurricane Hill, Olympic Mountains

4.+ 7  The Columbia Plateau  & Rocky mountains

  Helena @ Liberty, Equality and Geology - writes about Western Washington State (http://helenaheliotrope.blogspot.com/2010/11/upsides-and-downsides-of-mountains.html
Upsides-and-downsides-of-mountains

Helena writes
My favorite geological features are the volcanoes. These result from the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate:
Now, my least favorite geological features of Western Washington are also the Cascades, because they help cause the massive, constant amounts of rain.

 Here are some of her Illustrations and photos:

Cascades Volcano Observatory

Mt. Rainier

Mt. St. Helens

Mt. Adams

sequimwa.com

I've only been in this area a couple of times but she makes me want to come back and see it all again.

5 Basin and Range
   Silver Fox @ Looking for Detachment  - writes about Nevada and the Basin and Range.
http://highway8a.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-can-see-for-miles.html    I Can See For Miles...
Silver Fox's title says it all 'I can see for Miles...., and miles and miles.'
She also adds 'I love the mountains. (Note the trees and above-tree-line alpine terrain, a sometimes underated or underexplored feature of the Basin and Range.) (You have to check out the photos).  I love the valleys. (Note the hot springs in the foreground, a nice and warm geologic feature of the Basin and Range.) I love viewing the mountains from the valleys. (Note the prominent range-front fault, one of the many fascinating geologic features of the Basin and Range). She concludes with - If there's anything about the geology of Nevada and the Basin and Range that I don't like, it's that there is just too much of it for me to see it all!



I know what she means about this because I did my summer field camp work in this area.  You can't help but to fall in love with the area once you start to study it.  It had a little bit of everything there.  I just wished I had more time there.



6.  Colorado Plateau
    The geologist @ Geology Happens writes about the San Juan Mountains of Colorado
http://geologyhappens.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-i-love-about-geology-of-home-aw-29.html  What I love about the geology of home AW-29
 Here's a little bit of what the the geologist has to say:
How can you not love the San Juan Mountains of Colorado? Just in a single glance we can see sediment deposited in ancient seaways and ancient deserts, intense mountain building with its accompanied faults and folds and the topped off with all sorts of volcanic evidence from lava flows and ash deposits to hydrothermal mineral deposits then the whole mix was well glaciated just a short time ago. My only compliant is that the area is so complex that my small mind has trouble wrapping around some of the views. I keep saying that the rocks tell a story, well this story is a bit complex.

Check these out.

A high country lake near Silverton Colorado

Red Mountain #2, taken from Red Mountain #1 on the edge of the Silverton caldera. Obviously a heavily mineralized area with not-so-original names.
An arch found in the Cedar Mesa formation
That's me on top of Bow Knot bend, named by Powell as the Green River flows 7 miles to travel 600 yards through a very tight entrenched meander.
Entering spilt mountain in Dinosaur NM on the Green River
 
9. The Central Lowlands have a couple of ones with
    Matt @ Research at a snails pace talking about western Wisconsin
http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2010/11/home-is.html  Home is...

Matt's was short and sweet and to the point - he also includes some photo's for illustration.
I like the challenges of piecing together the little bits of information that tell me about the evolution of this landscape. I also like that there are many scenic little rivers that are near my house. 



I do wish we had some big mountains nearby...

...but I guess that's why we go on field trips.

The other is David @ Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs writing about Northwest Indiana
http://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2010/03/love-in-time-of-crinoids.html  Love in the time of Crinoids

David writes:
Now my wife and I live in Bloomington, in south central Indiana, and it's lousy with interesting geology. The bedrock under my house is limestone created during the period called the Mississippian. This was the first half of the period more widely known as the Carboniferous, named for the great coal-bearing strata it contains. The coal is the compressed biomass of the swampy forests that were the dominant land ecosystem of Carboniferous Earth, a process that mainly took place during the second half of the period, called the Pennsylvanian. The Mississippian deposits underlying Bloomington are the remains of shallow seafloors, and then as now, shallow seas teemed with life.

Thanks to this, I've collected a small assortment of marine fossils, mostly fragments of sea lilies called crinoids, as well as a few brachiopods. Really, you could do a lot worse than the Carboniferous when picking a place to live. It's arguably the geological period with the deepest impact on our lives, offering up the coal on which the industrial revolution was run and limestone that went into building the Pentagon and the Empire State Building, among others. Any Indiana kid feeling left out of the dinosaur fossil jamboree of the Western US actually has plenty to be proud of.

Check out the rest of what he has to say. He concludes with:
Here are a couple photos of a some crinoid stem pieces I found last year. Get enough of them and you've got one handsome necklace.



 
 12 Appalachian Plateau
   Jessica @ Magma Cum Laude writes about Western New York
http://blogs.agu.org/magmacumlaude/2010/11/12/gas-seeps-in-western-ny/  Gas Seeps in Western NY

Jessica writes:  (I just had to include this photo since I thought it was so amazing.)
One of my favorites is in the Shale Creek Preserve at Chestnut Ridge Park. See why?

The Eternal Flame falls at the Shale Creek Preserve

That’s right – it’s under a waterfall! The flame is sheltered just enough that it doesn’t go out very often (although it’s always a good idea to bring a lighter along if you’re going to visit). Gas wells in this area are generally drilled into the Medina Group (a collection of sandsones and shales, which you can see exposed in the base of Niagara Falls to the north), but the seep itself is in the Hanover Shale, which apparently also has a bit of gas in it.

I am going to definitely have to check this out!!!!

18 Coastal Plain
My submission is located in Northwest LA, under Accretionary Wedge 29 - Geologic features
http://annsmusingsongeologyotherthings.blogspot.com/2010/11/accretionary-wedge-29-geologic-features.ht

19. Superior Upland
Some how I miss Anne's post at Highly Allochthonous http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/  The Driftless Area .  Sorry Anne - I've now edited it so here's your area too. 

The Driftless Area: Fewer glaciers but more topography than the rest of Minnesota

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Anne Jefferson

Tucked into the corner where Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa meet there’s a special area with a Quaternary history that sets it apart from the rest of the northern United States.
At the Last Glacial Maximum, the Des Moines lobe lay to the west of this area and the Green Bay lobe lay to the east. But in this area, the land surface was not covered with ice. For this reason, extreme southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa and western Wisconsin together are known as the Driftless Area, because drift is an old name for till, and where there were no glaciers, no till could be deposited.
Even before the last glacial period, the Driftless Area seems to have uniquely escaped the terrain smoothing, till depositing influences of the ice sheets. (Play with this animation to watch southeastern Minnesota avoid glacial advance after glacial advance.) The map below shows the maximum extent of glaciers at (a) 1 million years ago, (b) ~600,000 years ago, (c) ~250,000 years ago (the Illinoian glaciation) and (d) ~22,000 years ago (Wisconsinan glaciation). In all of those reconstructions, there’s a stippled doughnut hole that defines the Driftless Area.

Glacial advances relative to the formation of the Driftless Area (Reinertsen, 1992*)

While in most parts of the Upper Midwest, the Paleozoic stratigraphy is buried under glacial deposits, millions of years of uninterrupted erosion have spectacularly dissected the landscape of the Driftless Area, creating 150+ m bluffs and narrow valleys. This dissected landscape stands out in sharp contrast to the flatter glaciated areas which surround it, as shown in the image below.

Topography of the Driftless Area and surrounding regions

On the ground, the topography is even more dramatic, particularly along the Mississippi River valley. In the image below, two hillsides part of Great River Bluffs State Park in Minnesota show the steepness of relief that can be found in the area.

Hillsides of the Driftless Area (image by McGheiver on Wikimedia)

Growing up in this region, I always wondered why people said the Midwest was flat!
–
*If anyone can help me track down the full citation of this article, I’d be most appreciative. I borrowed the image from here.



NOW FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD
David @ History of Geology just sent his submission from The eastern Alps
http://historyofgeology.blogspot.com/2010/12/accretionary-wedge-29-geologic-features.html

He writes: 
Accretionary Wedge 29 - Geologic features of 'home' I do not like
Making a living as field geologists in the Eastern Alps has some advantages, there is a great variety of rocks to map and you can easily pass from the valley floors with cities and villages, passing by dark forests to the bleak peaks of the mountains.
But this dualisms of the landscape also hides a great injustice to the geologist. Humans tend to build and live in the lower storeys of the mountains, areas mostly covered by boring rubble and nasty plants, zones where the outcrop-quality and quantity is scarce and low.
The higher storeys of the mountains have excellent outcrops, but you rarely will find somebody who pays you to map these zones. So you have to suffer and map zones in the middle of the forest, and in the rare glades you can spot the distant mountains, like sirens calling, and like a fata morgana unapproachable.

The cruel truth

Sometimes it is hard to be in the field, maybe better turn back...

...oh, well, never mind...

Finally out of the forest...

Outcrop No.1.

Where is the next outcrop... I think I will map "Quaternary undifferentiated", what's planned for tomorrow ? ... map area "thorny shrubbery"…
NOW BACK TO ME AGAIN
This has been so much fun and such a learning experience for me. Again I want to thank everyone that sent me material. If you miss this call and want to submit things to it I am willing to add more to it.  I do realize there was a problem with getting the call into the Wedge itself and realize some of you may not have known it was out there.

My contribution to Accretionary Wedge #29

 I put out a call for Accretionary Wedge -29. 
The topic is: "What Geological features about the area you call 'home' do you love? and what do you not like?"


There is no one ideal place to live and study all the earth processes that fascinates me; I have had to pick one place - settle there and call it 'home'.  Every place that I have ever lived and called 'home' for awhile has always had very interesting geologic features to it that makes it unique.  In Northeast Ohio it was the effects of glaciation, in Southeastern Ohio it was the Paleozoic Cyclothems exposed in the Appalachian Plateau, and currently I live on a bayou in Louisiana.  What is it about the area you that you now call 'home'  that is so fascinating to you. What do you not like?  Did you choose to live where you are because you love the geology of the region and just wanted to live the in the area or was there another reason that brought you there?



Since I put out the call I felt I needed to get something together for it. So here's a little of what I have to muse about my home area.  

   About 30 years ago I move to the area I now call home because of a job offer with a major oil company.  At the time I had a few job offers, I basically had to choose between Houston, TX or Shreveport, LA. Neither one of which really appealed to me since they were both so far from my family and home in Ohio.  I choose Shreveport (and less money) because it was a small city and didn't have the traffic & city  problems that Houston had.  I have never regretted that choice since I find the city such a wonder place to live. 
The company I worked for had its office located where it was because it was right in the middle of the area where they had most of their production going on.  I was hired as a developmental geologist and being close to the fields did help a lot.  Back then it was the era before fax machines and personal computers, we had to commute to the wells to do our work and get the information ie logs and cuttings. So it was the prolific oil and gas in the subsurface that brought me to the area and made it possible to make a living here.. 
At the time the company I was with was mainly concerned with just oil production and we were mostly looking at the Tokio formation.  This formation had been drilled through a lot and never developed much because the logs indicated there wasn't oil there, but the drillers reports did report traces of oil as they drilled through it.  The mystery was finally solved when they started to take core samples of the zone and realized that there was a high amount of volcanic ash in it that was suppressing some of the electrical responses of the logs. 

  Another zone of interest was a deeper zone called the Smackover.  The Smackover was an oolitic limestone.  They realized that the zone could be fractured open with acid and could be quite prolific with the proper preparation.
     Now a days the area is all abuzz about the Haynesville shale.  It is a gas play and there is some exciting things going on with it.  When I was working as a developmental geologist we did not have any interest in it because of two reasons.  One it was gas and my company was only interested in oil -- if gas was also present that was considered a bonus but we were not to actively search for gas.  And the other it was in a tight formation which at the time the technology just wasn't there to be able to produce it economically.  (boy have things sure change in 30 years)
to get some more information on the Haynesville shale go to
http://geology.com/articles/haynesville-shale.shtml

Here are some old diagrams that I got from when I took a training seminar from Shlumberger (1983) to help explain the subsurface geology.

All of this was exciting to be around and I did enjoy it.  In mid eighties the oil industry went through a major slump and there were massive layoffs.  In 1986, after getting transferred to Lafayette and working offshore (with totally different geology), my husband and I decided we were ready to start a family and I let it be known I wouldn't mind being laid off.  So I got laid off, moved back to Shreveport, and had my 1 child in 1987.

  We owned a home on a bayou and I loved living on the bayou.  I found it so peaceful and relaxing to see the waters flow by while I was outside playing with the kids or working in the yard.  After awhile we needed a bigger home.  We couldn't pass up the chance to get a bigger home on the bayou and move there.  We have been there ever since and really don't want to live anywhere else. Also having great neighbors makes it all the more wonderful.  I should add that we are in a great location within 3 miles of anything you could want.  What's nice about our bayou is the fact it makes a natural barrier so it keeps people out of the area unless they want to be there and feels like living in the country but lets you have all the conveniences of living in a city.
  According the the 'Dictionary of Geological Terms' by the American Geological Institute (1976- pg 38-39):  bayou  - A lake, or small sluggish secondary stream, often in an abandoned channel of a river delta.  Local on Gulf Coast.  One of the half closed channels of a river delta. Local on the Mississippi delta. We are not on the Mississippi delta but the Red River which does empty into the Mississippi.  Our bayou is call the Old River Bayou or as the locals call it 'the duck pond on E. Kings Hwy.'  It is connected to the Red River and goes up and down like the river does, but not as dramatically as the Red. 
   The opening photo is a picture of my backyard on the bayou.
Here are two more taken on 11-28-10 the top is of the same tree that is seen on the left side of the opening photo.

If you go to my musings on AW -28 you can see some other pictures of the back yard.   The bayou is so fascinating to watch, you never know what you will see.  There are all sorts of critters that I have seen on it.  I've seen ducks, geese, beavers, snakes, alligators, rats, nutria rats, possums, mice,
and the birds.  I'm not much with birdwatching but I have seen a lot - my favorite are the purple martins and thus we have the birdhouses for them.  Others we have seen: sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, robins,  hawks, hummingbirds, egrets, swallows and may others I don't know their names for. 
   Because of the nature of  bayou's the vegetation is very prolific and covers up any soil/rock exposure there my be. (I do miss my rock outcrops - but the peaceful waters more than make up for it)  We do have two cypress trees growing near it and those trees really make you feel like you are in the south with their cypress knees protruding up through the ground.  There is lot of other things growing but I really don't know much about it and don't feel like musing on them at this time.
  The one thing I love about the south is the people and the food they like to make.  It doesn't take much to get us a group together to have fun just visiting and eating wonderful things.  One of their favorite get together is to have a crawfish boil; which is a whole other topic in itself.
  The one thing I do NOT  like about the bayou is it a breeding ground for mosquitoes.  But then that's why I like the purple martins so much because they eat there body weight in mosquitoes everyday. 
  The other thing I do not like about where I live is its in the south and it gets HOT in the summer.  Frequently we can have very long periods of time where it is 95+ with high humidity.  Whenever it gets around those temperatures I find I just have to have some air conditioning  to get a break from those extreme temperature.
   I find Shreveport a great place to live and am happy living here.

Call to Post - Accretionary Wedge #29

This was orginaly at 'Ann's Musings on Geology and other things'.  That blog no longer exists so it was moved here. 

Call For Post - Accretionary Wedge # 29
The topic is: "What Geological features about the area you call 'home' do you love? and what do you not like?"

There is no one ideal place to live and study all the earth processes that fascinates me; I have had to pick one place - settle there and call it 'home'.  Every place that I have ever lived and called 'home' for awhile has always had very interesting geologic features to it that makes it unique.  In Northeast Ohio it was the effects of glaciation, in Southeastern Ohio it was the Paleozoic Cyclothems exposed in the Appalachian Plateau, and currently I live on a bayou in Louisiana.  What is it about the area you that you now call 'home'  that is so fascinating to you. What do you not like?  Did you choose to live where you are because you love the geology of the region and just wanted to live the in the area or was there another reason that brought you there?

Submit posts by November 30.  
 My email address is amowillis@yahoo.com

Accretionary Wedge #28- Desk-crops

October’s theme is going to be “Desk-crops.” This can be any rock or other geological* specimen that you have lying around your office/desk/lab that has a story to tell. The spookier the better. Photos and/or illustrations are very important (although not absolutely required). This is taken directly from Ron Schott’s “deskrcop series” of his rocks and such – great examples of what I had in mind with the theme (but not the only way to skin this horse).

The deadline is Friday, October 29… so find your spookiest paperweights in time for Halloween.



This is my submission for my Desk-crop. It is a piece of Amber.  I know its not very spooky.  But it has a lot of sentimental meaning to me. It was given to me by my exchange student from the Mecklenburger region of Germany. He lived in Rostock which is located on the Baltic Sea.  As a child he liked to collect pieces of amber on the beach.  He wanted me to have a piece of his home.
  I have wondered about the texture on it.  At first I thought the texture was from the tree bark that it might have been on.  But it doesn't look like bark.  Now I wonder if the texture wasn't formed as it dried and shrunk.
( New material added 11-3-10) As Matt at Research at a Snails Pace, has pointed out Amber is a fossil resin from coniferous trees.(The Dictionary of Geological Terms rev. ed -1976 Prepared under the direction of the American Geological Institute pg 12). The piece I have is very light and weathered.  I could see how it would float on the Baltic sea and be washed ashore after it had weathered out of the rock. The edges are rounded so I feel like it has been in the water.  On the back side there appears to be some salt crystals in some holes. It also appears as if something tried to burrow into it creating those holes were the salt, accumulated. I tried to take a picture of it but my camera just couldn't capture it and do it justice.
I was also wondering if anyone knows anything about how Amber changes as it solidifies. My initial assumption it was caused by resting next to some tree bark, then I changed it to shrinkage due to solidification because it has the polygonal indentations on it that are typical as mud dries.  But the problem I've had with that is they do not radiate inwards, but I am dealing with weathering too. Now I'm also considering the possibility that it might have come from being next to an animal skin. But if it was on top of the skin the ridges should be sticking up and not indented in as they are.  There is something about it that makes me think of snakes.  Now I wondering if a snake could have shed its skin and some how the amber got inside of it and solidified in the trapped skin. Any theories anyone else comes up with would be greatly appreciated.   It is a fun piece to pick up and ponder (ophs) I should say muse upon.

These photos are on the table next to my desk where I work.  I think of it as my Germany section.
The exchange student is the boy in the Shreve shirt to the right, in the 3x 5 photo. The little boy with him is my youngest son.  I have it next to the picture of me when I was in Germany on my honeymoon 25 years ago.   







Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Baltic amber.

Baltic amber

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Baltic amber collected at Sopot, Poland.

Typical beach sand on the Baltic Sea where amber is often washed up.

Different colours of Baltic amber.

Fishing for amber at the seacoast, Mikoszewo, close to Gdansk, Poland.

The Baltic region is home to the largest known deposit of amber, called Baltic amber, with about 80% of the world's known amber found there. It dates 44 million years ago (Eocene).^[1] It has been estimated that these forests created over 10⁵ tons of amber.^[2]
The term Baltic amber is generic, so amber from the Bitterfeld brown coal mines in Saxonia (Eastern Germany) goes under the same name. Bitterfeld amber was previously believed to be only 20-22 million years old (Miocene), but a comparison of the animal inclusions revealed that it is most probably genuine Baltic amber that has only been redeposited in a Miocene deposit.^[3]
Because Baltic amber contains about 8% succinic acid, it is also termed succinite.
It was thought since the 1850s that the resin that became amber was produced by the tree Pinites succinifer, but research in the 1980's came to the conclusion that the resin originates from several species. More recently it has been proposed, on the evidence of Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy (FTIR) analysis of amber and resin from living trees, that conifers of the family Sciadopityaceae were responsible.^[2] The only extant representative of this family is the Japanese umbrella pine, Sciadopitys verticillata.
Numerous extinct genera and species of plants and animals have been discovered and scientifically described from inclusions in Baltic amber.^[4]

[edit] See also

• Dominican amber
• Amber

[edit] References

1. ^ Ritzkowski, S. 1997. K-Ar-Altersbestimmungen der bernsteinführenden Sedimente des Samlandes (Paläogen, Bezirk Kaliningrad). Metalla, Bochum, 66: 19–23.
2. ^ ^{a b} Wolfe, A. P. et al. 2009. A new proposal concerning the botanical origin of Baltic amber. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.0806
3. ^ Dunlop, J.A. & Giribet, G. 2003. The first fossil cyphophthalmid (Arachnida: Opiliones), from Bitterfeld amber, Germany. Journal of Arachnology, 31: 371-378.
4. ^ Weitschat, W. & Wichard, W. 2002. Atlas of Plants and Animals in Baltic Amber. Pfeil, 256 pp.

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Categories: Fossil resins | Eocene | Oligocene | Paleontolog

But the 'Desk-Crop' I enjoy the most is the view I get from looking out of my home windows. I love working out of my home because I enjoy living on the bayou so much.  It makes it feel like I am living in the south.
Here is the view from the desk I used to work at all the time.  It is now my youngest son's bedroom, so now I have to work at a different place in the house, but it is still my favorite view of my back yard.

When the weathers nice I sometimes prefer to work from my back porch.  Here's the view I get from there.  I always find it so peace full and calming.









More views of my back yard.  I enjoy my back yard because it is always constant but ever changing.

 

This is a couple of days after The New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl. (2-12-10) We all said Hell really did freeze over for us to get snow.  For years and years that has always been a standard joke in LA.  - That the Aint's would only win when Hell freezes over.  Now they are not the Ain't but the  
Saints of the 'WHO DAT' Nation.

We also have a camp on Lake Bistineau which I sometimes go and work at too.  Here are some photo's of the yard. The kids like going there because it's reminds them of the Louisiana swamps and is a lot more spookier than our back yard.

I am now in the Wedge thanks to Matt. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
I'm just including what's been added, to the wedge stuff.

Ann Says:
November 3, 2010 at 1:54 am | Reply
Why can’t you edit your blog to include me now? Why do I have to wait until the next time? Why have they stopped posting things here at the wedge?

• Matt Says:
  November 3, 2010 at 2:55 pm Ann,
  I just found your blog and scrolled down to see your AW#28 post. I added it to the list. I don’t know why the updates on the AW main page aren’t more frequent, you’d have to ask the person in charge of the site.
  

UPDATE: Ann,who muses on geology and other things, has a post. It got lost in the shuffle and I wasn't able to find a link to the post until today. She writes a few musings about a piece of amber. As you may know, amber is the fossilized sap of trees. It has the interesting property of being slightly less dense than salt water, so sometimes chunks of amber erode out of the rock where they are preserved and wash up somewhere down the shore.

Labels: accretionary wedge, blog carnival, deskcrops, halloween, trinitite