At the Devil’s Golf Course stop there was several pictures
of the salt deposits, by the one below caught my eye. This is a significant amount of salt buildup
for the shadow lakes to produce. It is
uncommon for contemporary lakes to contain salt, which leads me to question the
nature of the shadow lakes. Where they
land locked? If so, was it common for
the lakes 2000+ years ago to contain this amount of salt? These could be answered by studying strata of
the area to see if there were there was a sea, as well as, study strata in
different locations to see if was common for lakes to contain this quantity of
salt.
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| Photo from NPS archives |
At the Badwater stop, there was a picture of 1.7
billion-year-old metamorphic rock. I
noticed that the layers of these rock look very thin, which makes me wonder if
this rock was formed by several layers of hardened lava from volcanic
activity. The rock is in layers, so it
is not intrusive and testing of the rock to identify it could answer the question. I also noticed a horizontal crack through the
layers of rock, which could indicate a strike-slip fault. Further investigation of the strata layers within
the area from the same chronological time could confirm the existence of the
fault.
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| Photo by Marli Miller |
This picture was taken from the Mosaic Canyon stop. I thought that this picture was the most interesting. The picture had a caption that identified the folds of the marble, as expected, by fail to mention of the crack the runs through the folds. Was this crack manmade or naturally occurring? If it was natural, would this indicate the folds occurred from the compression caused by two plate converging and then the change of the nature of their convergence (maybe subduction) that caused the shear stress needed to create the fault line? To possibly get an answer, whoever took the sample would need to be questioned. Also, further investigation of the nearby strata would need to be conducted in order to verify the folding and fault were consistent.
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