cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MY WV Trip The 5 days or whatever it was in WV were all right. Exhausting, but all right. We were staying in a log cabin with no electricity and no running water. Outhouse. Not really my cup of tea. Primitive camping is fine by me. I do pretty well in almost any outdoor conditions and am not rattled by rain, snow, sleet, or cold so long as I've got some little scrap of shelter to retreat to. But this sort of in-between thing where I'm staying in a cabin but there's no toilet or shower and I'm sharing an outhouse with 7 or 8 people for days on end is just not my idea of a good time. The highlight was my rapid discovery that the place is loaded with fossils. By the bank of the creek that ran just a few yards behind the cabin, I noticed a few bits of coal and some dark gray shale among the rocks of the creek bed. Coal and shale says 'fossils' to me. I picked up a hunk of shale and carefully cracked it open to reveal the impression of a criss-crossing of flattened plant stems and a few tiny leaves. Pay dirt. This was how I spent probably 90% of my spare time. Looking for and finding fossils. I believe these to be plants of the carboniferous era, based on what I happened to know about the geological history of the region and on the appearance of the plants. What I was finding were ferns and the stalks of what seemed to be giant horsetails, which were the dominant plants of the mid to late carboniferous era. This was 30 million years before the dinosaurs first appeared, before woody trees and long before grasses existed. Based on the extremely high concentration of terrestrial plant fossils (nothing that seemed to be from the ocean), I believe that this area must have been a swamp or a very shallow lake. Plants died or were washed out and buried over by sediments in successive floods. The anaerobic environment beneath compact layers of sediment prevented the material from rotting before it was fossilized. Disassembling each large piece of shale was like opening the pages of a very old book. It is quite an exciting experience to pry apart a piece of rock and see the leaf of a fern sketched out in black with the precision of a photograph and know that this organism has been entombed in this rock for over 300 million years - since BEFORE the dinosaurs even existed - waiting right there for me to open it up and see it. The first living eyes to behold this fern in hundreds of millions of years. A few pieces that I opened had a partial coal conversion in spots where there was a very high organic content concentration. Like where there was a large seed in the middle of the fossil, the interior of the seed was all still there. The heat and pressure had long since cooked off a lot of that organic material, but the carbon of that seed was still there in a delicate seed shape which would crumble if you touched it. Yes, I confess. I couldn't resist. I ate that that 300 million year old seed just for the bizarre satisfaction of it. I mean, it's not like it could hurt me. It's essentially just a little patch of charcoal. It didn't taste bad. Not particularly good either, but not bad. On our last full day in the state forest, I hiked a few miles down the creek and climbed up the steep hillside alongside of it to closely examine the cliffs above. Thus far I'd just been looking at fossils that had washed into the creek bed and I wanted a better look at the actual strata. What I found up there was more interesting than just fossils. I'd been finding these odd bits of what looked like iron ore lying around in the stream beds. Some of them were round and all had strangely shaped hollows inside. Examining the strata of a cliff face I saw that right above the layer that seemed to hold the carboniferous era plant fossils was a thick layer of sandstone which had the iron ore suspended in it. What was surprising was the fact that a number of these pieces of ore were almost perfect spheres. I could see them in cross section and noted that they were hollow. Think about it. What natural phenomenon could possibly cause iron ore to be formed into hollow spheres? Only 2 things come to mind. Volcanic eruption and the impact of a meteor. I think that volcanic eruption is probably out of the question. This has never been a particularly volcanic area and there was no pumice, obsidion or other volcanic rock suspended within the sandstone. Just the iron ore. I happen to know how lead shot was traditionally made for use in shotguns. They would (and sometimes still) use what are called shot towers. Tiny bits of molten lead are dropped from the top of the tower down to a container below. The molten lead takes the form of a perfect sphere as it falls, much like a raindrop. The shot cools and hardens in mid air. By the time it hits the ground, it has assumed that perfect round shape and it will retain it. I imagine that the same thing would happen when a very large meteor hits the Earth. Many meteors are made of a mixture of rock and iron. The heat of both the entry into Earth's atmosphere and the impact into the ground would cause the material to become molten. The meteor breaks apart into many pieces on impact and those pieces go flying in all directions. The molten metal takes on a spherical shape as it flies through the air and if it goes far and long enough, it cools by the time it hits the ground and there you have a spherical piece of iron ore. These pieces that I saw had clearly landed in either a sandy patch of ground or in the sandy bed of a river or lake. So that's my theory. I think that what I found are pieces of some huge meteor that crashed into what was the Allegheny plains some time during either the late carboniferous era or perhaps shortly after. 17:03 - 2008-05-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||