Geo-pic of the week: Dardanelle Rock

Pictured above is Dardanelle Rock located on the south side of the Arkansas River between the towns of Dardanelle and Russellville. The white truck in the lower right corner shows the scale of this outcrop. It was designated a Natural Area by the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission in 1976.

The Arkansas River Valley is north of the Ouachita Mountains and is characterized by gently folded sedimentary rock that was subject, to a lesser extent, to the stress that folded the Ouachita Mountains.  The rock pictured here is the south limb of a broad syncline, or down-warped fold.  The north limb is about two miles to the northeast.  The bedrock dips to the north (toward the white truck), goes sub-surface beneath the Arkansas River, then reverses dip direction and rises back to the surface just southwest of Russellville.  If you could see a cross-section of the folded rock, it would look like giant a smiley face with the middle of the smile underground and the corners sticking up in opposite directions, two miles apart.

This picture gives perspective to the colossal size of geologic features geologists study.  Folds like this one, which can trap upward-migrating fluid, are sometimes rich oil and gas reservoirs.

GeoPic of the Week: Turtle Rocks at Petit Jean State Park

“Turtle Rocks” are unique, mounded polygonal structures that resemble turtle shells. These features are found along the Arkansas River Valley in the Hartshorne Sandstone, a brown to light gray, massive, medium-grained sandstone deposited during the Pennsylvanian Period by ancient river systems. The processes that generate “turtle rocks” are not clearly understood. One explanation suggests that these features were created by a process known as spheroidal weathering, a form of chemical weathering that occurs when water percolates through the rock and between individual sand grains. These grains loosen and separate from the rock, especially along corners and edges where the most surface area is exposed, which widens the rock’s natural fractures creating a rounded, turtle-like shape. Additionally, iron is leached from the rock and precipitated at the surface creating a weathering rind known as case hardening. These two processes along with the polygonal joint pattern contribute to this weathering phenomenon.