Geo-pic of the week: Igneous Dike

 

100 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period, a preponderance of igneous activity occurred in the continental region now known as Arkansas.  In fact, all of the igneous rocks discovered in the state were emplaced around that time.  Some of them are well known, such as Magnet Cove, located east of Hot Springs, or the diamond-bearing intrusion near Murfreesboro.    There are also lots of smaller igneous intrusions like the one shown in the picture above. 

Small igneous intrusions are found throughout the Ouachita Mountains.  There are so many small intrusions that new ones are regularly discovered.  Weathering at the earth’s surface has typically destroyed the original rock’s characteristics and what remains is mostly soft clay because the minerals that make up the intrusion are unstable under surface conditions. 

If you happen to notice an unusual-looking body of rock that cuts across the strata of a road cut or other rock outcrop when you’re exploring the Ouachita Mountains, it’s likely that you have seen a Cretaceous igneous dike.

Geo-pic of the week: Sigmoidal Veins

The picture above shows a boulder of Hot Springs Sandstone with well-developed sigmoidal veins.  Sigmoidal veins – sometimes called tension gashes – form in rock by shear stress.  That’s stress that causes adjacent parts of a rock to slide past one another.  In the above picture the yellow arrows indicate the approximate orientation of the stresses that were applied to this boulder to create the sigmoidal veins.

Sigmoidal veins, at their inception, are shaped like parallel lines that bulge toward the center and taper at the ends.  They originate due to tension created between the two opposing forces acting on the rock.  Essentially the rock tears to alleviate this tension.  If the shearing continues long enough, these openings in the rock begin to rotate.  The eventual shape, seen above, is like the letter S.  The ends of each S point opposite of the direction of the force that created them.  Therefore, sigmoidal veins can indicate the forces at work on bedrock when it was buried underground.

The veins pictured here are at the edge of a parking lot next to the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs Arkansas.  After they developed the veins were in filled with quartz.  The Hot Springs Sandstone is a member of the Mississippian Stanley Formation.