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: Calcite-filled Tabulate Coral

Continuing with our previous theme “Sharkansas”,  this week’s geo-pic is on Arkansas corals.  Of course, corals don’t live in Arkansas today, but from about 480 million years ago, up until roughly 40 million years ago, coral would have been a fairly common sight in the natural state.

The picture above is of a tabulate coral: a now-extinct variety of colonial coral.  Each hexagonal corallite chamber housed a simple, individual animal, called a polyp, that could protrude and retract to filter food from the water.  The chambers in this fossil are in-filled with the mineral calcite, but that occurred after the coral died and was incorporated into the rock.  It was photographed in the Ozark Plateaus, in the Prairie Grove Member of the Hale Formation.

Other varieties of coral are found in the rocks of Arkansas.  For more views of Arkansas corals click here