Geo-pic of the week: Fracture-Fill at Shine-Eye

The photo above shows a vertical dark rock in the center of flat-lying white rock. The dark rock is a sandstone deposit, probably Mississippian-aged, and the white rock is Silurian-aged limestone. If one were to follow the sandstone dike upward, it would lead to a sandstone bed sitting on top of the limestone. Since the limestone was deposited first, we can infer that it was exposed to weathering. The limestone was solutioned and deep fractures or cracks formed. Afterwards, sand was deposited in the area, filled the fractures in the limestone, and eventually lithified into sandstone. There are several of these sandstone-filled fractures present along the Buffalo National River in Silurian-aged limestone. The one pictured above is located at Shine-Eye.

Geo-pic of the week: Solution sinkholes

A sinkhole is an area of ground that has no external surface drainage.  Water that enters a sinkhole exits by draining into the subsurface.  Many people are leery of sinkholes because of the damage they sometimes cause.  Every now and then, a catastrophic sinkhole-collapse makes headlines, typically by swallowing someone’s house, or even draining an entire lake. 

Not every kind of sinkhole is the dangerous kind though.  The picture above shows a solution sinkhole.  Unlike the feared collapse sinkhole, the solution sinkhole forms by chemical weathering of rock at the ground surface resulting in gradual lowering of the surface to form a depression.  Solution sinkholes form in areas where fractures and joints in the bedrock create pathways through which rainwater can infiltrate the ground. 

In, Arkansas, sinkholes are common in the northern part of the Ozark Plateaus where much of the bedrock is limestone or dolostone.  These types of rocks are notorious for sinkhole development because they are soluble in weakly acidic rain water.