Geology

On our tour of Utah's National Parks...

By the time we got to Capital Reef, we were thinking about Geology: About the 'layer cake' of rock we were walking on, miles thick, made up of sandstone, mudstone, shale, salts, and limestone, all 'icing-ed' over each other in their respective ages - as the area was at times under an inland sea collecting the detritus of the coral reefs; part of a wind-blown desert where there were dunes of sand ultimately compressed into rock; or covered by river floodplains (dinosaurs and giant trees!) now seen as shale. There is gypsum, quartz and clay. Where did it all come from - and when? The timescale is staggering, as is the contemplation of what has been laid down under our feet over the millennia. And it’s all been carved up and exposed in irregular cuts from erosion, leaving behind spectacular cliffs and hoodoos.

Our Park notes indicate the exposed formation to be from the middle Jurassic Period (180 million years ago) to the Cretaceous Period (95 million years ago.) The Carmel Formation - oldest - has layers of gypsum which forms white striations in the red colored cliffs. Just above is the Entrada - formed from deposits laid down during the mid-to-late Jurassic Period and mostly fine-grained sandstone.

We know that rock layers (strata) are laid down in succession over time. Geologic time is identified in a complex system of categories that labels those layers... Evidently we are now in the Cenozoic Era and the Quaternary Period and the Holocene Epoch (with no "age" yet designated as far as my limited research indicated before I got bored with the whole subject.)

Perhaps you know already where all this Geology talk is going. Being us, we just HAD to start speculation about what is being 'laid down' in modern times and what future Geologists will make of it.


Mark designated it the "Cretinous" age and predicted its strata to be full of plastic water bottles, disposable diapers, petrified pizza boxes and Diet Coke cans.