The arches are fantastic! What is the geology of the place? I know the Appalachian mountains are very ancient, do they have many fossils in the rock?
The arches are fantastic! What is the geology of the place? I know the Appalachian mountains are very ancient, do they have many fossils in the rock?
There's so many of them too! Wandered about 100m past one of my backcountry campsites last year and found one hiding. I honestly can't answer the geology question well, I know the arches are all sandstone and there's plenty of limestone here but my hasty search wasn't able to turn up much about the geologic history. Think it was once an ancient sea shore (bed?), so there's got to be plenty of fossils but I don't recall ever hearing much about them. This area has been inhabited since prehistoric times though, lots of artifacts and such for the archeologists. It was something of a pastime in the area to go down under the cliffs along the rivers and sift for arrowheads and other relics.
Sounds wonderful! Sandstone will weather into arches so you answered my question. The rocks where I live are some of the oldest on the planet, formed before there was life on earth so unfortunately no fossilised life forms but we do have these, which are pretty cool: river estuaries turned to stone. The area was the shoreline of an inland sea back in the day and then the river mouth turned to rock and thereafter the earth's crust was shattered by a massive meteorite strike (it's visible on satellite photos) which would have been an extinction event, had there been any life-forms to kill at that time
Fascinating. It's the decayed concrete stone! I've come across some of that before but if context didn't give me some clues I was never quite sure if it was stone or decayed concrete. It usually had a few shells mixed in though, interesting to see one without that.
Do you know the name of that impact event? It sounds like a good candidate for a wikipedia rabbit hole. Saw this impact crater a while back and have been slightly obsessed since.
Start here and then my part of the crater is Johannesburg, called the Witwatersrand where the inland sea part that formed those rocks is described
Your crater is interestingly different - the ones I know are clearly holes. This is also near my home