Unidentified Sedimentary Object

These large (hammer is 20cm long) vertical structures are found in lacustrine sediments (homogeneous fine-grained sand with dropstones, left of picture) of the Alpine last glacial maximum.
They show a sharp contact to the surrounding sediments, seem to be layered vertically - note however that the longest axis of the pebbles seem to be oriented horizontally - origin: unknown. 

Men Of Rock & The Big Freeze

March 23, 1769 William Smith - Pioneer of applied Geology

"It´s all there locked in the stone,

the truth is told in fossilized bone."

Devonian blues by Ray Troll (2005)

"Fossils have been long studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at a great expense, and shown and admired with as much pleasure as a child's hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum."

William Smith, notes written January 5, 1796

William Smith was born March 23, 1769 in the village of Churchill, in the county of Oxfordshire, into a respectable farming family. His father died when he was seven, so his mother brought him to the farm of his uncle.
And just here the young William makes an encounter that will change his life. In these parts of Oxfordshire, for the “long pound” - a weight standard of ca. 600g - are used not the common iron weights, but strange rounded stones. They are commonly found in the nearby quarries. Smith is fascinated of this stones - why they resemble the sea urchins, that he has seen in the books or on the coast of the sea, distant more then 160 kilometers from the place where they are now found? If these are remnants of animals, why are they petrified.  Why some of them resemble animals that no scholar has ever seen? Puzzled by this mystery, he starts to collect minerals and fossils. He is an enthusiastic autodidact; studying the landscape he quickly learns geometry, surveying and mapping,  hydraulics and hydrology.


At the age of eighteen he became an assistant surveyor, learning his trade from the master surveyor Edward Webb. Surveying required Smith to travel all over England; in 1794 and following years he toured the entire country. Detailed maps were essential to plan and construct streets and canals for the industrial revolution -  good surveyors were requested workers.
Here Smith can apply his knowledge, the job of surveying canal routes requires detailed knowledge of the rocks through which the canal was to be build.
In 1792 he works for the rich coalmine owner Elisabeth Jones in Somerset. He lives in a property of the lady – Rugbourne Farm - that he will later call the birthplace of his geology, because of his habit to sit in a niche of the house and study his rocks.
He notes that the coal-bearing layers are over- and underline by a characteristic succession of sandstones and marls. Always is the coal formation overlain by marine and then non-marine rocks. Always is the coal stratum underline by a grey clay – the ancient soil on which the coal forming giant ferns and horsetails grown, millions of years ago.
Even more important, Smith observed that the fossils found in a section of sedimentary rocks were always in a certain order from the bottom to the top of the section. This order of appearance could also be seen in other rock sections, even those on the other side of the British island - maybe on the entire world there is a certain order of strata and whoever can read it will quickly discover the coal-formation – the black gold of the 18th century.

". . . each stratum contained organized fossils peculiar to itself, and might, in cases otherwise doubtful, be recognised and discriminated from others like it, but in a different part of the series, by examination of them"

This is the statement of the "principle of faunal succession": The layers of sedimentary rocks in any given location contain fossils of a definite age in a definite sequence; the same sequence can be found in rocks elsewhere and hence the strata with the same fossils can be correlated between various locations. 
The principle of deposition, a stratum that lays below in a succession is older, and vice versa, was not new. But Smith was the first to proof this hypothesis by using guide fossils. Geological maps before Smith mapped and catalogued rocks by their inorganic characteristics - like sandstones, marls and chalks. Still further differentiation was only possible maybe by colour or other minor properties. This classification was very restricted and it showed no apparent pattern. Smith discovered and applied  an ulterior classification scheme, a scheme that can differ rocks with no doubt, even if they look very similar.

Fig.2. Ammonites, characteristic fossils for the Mesozoic and the most appreciated fossils by Smith.

In 1816 he publishes his observations in form of a book and a map, describing for ever strata of the United Kingdom the characteristic fossils:

Strata - Identified by organized Fossils.

Fig.3. A diagram of 1888, showing the sequence of strata and their characteristic fossils. Notice that at this date, the recently proposed Ordovician (1878) System had not yet been accepted, nor the Paleocene (1874) or Oligocene (1854) as epochs of the Cenozoic. Instead of “Precambrian” or “Primary” this scale uses the term “Laurentian”, since the studies of Precambrian rocks had made the most progress in the Laurentian region of the Canadian Shield.

Bibliography:

SMITH, W. (1816-1819). Strata identified by organized fossils, containing prints on coloured paper of the most characteristic specimens in each stratum. London: W. Arding.

WINCHESTER, W. (2001). The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New York: Harper Collins.

The last Ichthyosaurus

"The last Ichthyosaurus"  (1854)

"A hiss between the horsetails
Suspicious shines the sea -
There comes with tears in his eyes
An Ichthyosaurus swimming here.

He laments the corruption of times,
as alarming indications
were spotted already
in the Lias stratifications.

The plesiosaur, the old fellow,
Lives off the fat of the land,
And Pterodactyl itself
Recently flew home after much he drank.

The Iguanodon, such a tyke,
Becomes even more cheeky:
As he kissed Ms. Ichthyosauria
Seen by all the other gentry.

I guess there comes a world disaster,
So it can no longer going on!
What will become of the Lias,
If such things are done?

So sighed poor Ichthyosaurus,
his heart crumbling like a chalky cliff,
And so his last breath
went down the hissing tide.

So in this last hour
The entire dinosauria
Went much to deep into the Cretaceous Period
Went extinct as it's time was over.

And if you ask who told me this,
This petrified song
I found it on a fossil palm leaf
Inside a Coprolite!!"

German poet Joseph Viktor von Scheffel (1826-1886)

A geologist riddle #25

The drawing from the field by a great geologist (already featured on this blog) from a country not yet discussed...the mysterious geologist travelled far, visited Ceylon, Japan, Taiwan, Celebes, Java, the Philippines, Siam, Burma and explored California. The drawings, published after 1877, shows an outcrop from his last journey, during his search for the black gold of the 19th century.

How the Study of Plants revealed the Variability of Climate

The news of the resuscitated "Ice Age plant", regenerated from 30.000 year old tissue conserved in permafrost, is an intriguing discovery that will help to better understand the evolution of ecosystems during one of the most dramatic epochs of earth history - the Pleistocene-Holocene transition some 10.000 years ago, characterized by strong climatic oscillations from glacial to interglacial conditions.

Already the study of fossil plants played an important role in the reconstruction of the environment and the climate of this period.  The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the first naturalists to scientifically discuss the distribution of plants related to environmental factors like temperature, rainfall, latitude, height and soil - one of the most famous results of this work is the depiction of the vegetation belts of the Andes.

Fig.1. Vegetation zonation in the Andes, from the "Berghaus-Atlas", a supplement to Humboldt´s work "Kosmos", published in 1645-1862.

Based on these observations it became clear that the fossil remains of plants can be used to reconstruct the environmental factors during the lifetime of these plants.
In 1876 the Norwegian botanist Axel Gudbrand Blytt (1843-1898) published a book on his observations about the distribution of the Ice Age flora on the Scandinavian Peninsula. He recognized various plant communities - defined as Arctic, Subarctic, Boreal, Atlantic, Subboreal and Subatlantic - and suggested, based also on layers of peat where he observed the same plant communities in a certain order, that these communities were the results of various climate driven migrations waves on the peninsula. For Blytt especially the change of dry and wet periods controlled the distribution and migration of plants. These supposed changes could also explain the discoveries of layers with tree stumps in peats all over Europe, grown there when the climate was more favourable for trees. 

Fig.2. Blytt´s map of the distribution of plant communities in Norway, from BLYTT 1876.

The Swedish geologist Lennart von Post (1884-1951) used particular plant remains to infer past climatic oscillations. Flowering plants produce pollen grains covered by a chemically very stable substance named Sporopollenin, therefore pollen grains usually are well preserved in soils and sediments. The structures, like spikes or pores, on the surface of pollen grains are species-specific and can be used to determine from which plant-species the pollen was produced. Von Post counted and identified many hundred of pollen grains found in specific depth-intervals of sediment cores and plotted the relative percentage of every species in a diagram. He found that there was a succession of different plants; cold periods during an Ice Age were dominated by pollen from trees adapted to cold and humid conditions, like birch or pine. During warmer periods the pollen of these species disappeared and new tree species, like oak and fir, appeared in the pollen diagram. When the landscape finally became occupied by humans the amount of tree pollen decreases, as the forest is replaced with fields of grass or crop and the pollen of these plants dominate in the sediment core. 

The study of pollen, or palynology, is still today an important tool that helps to reconstruct local environment and climatic changes, the stratigraphy of recent deposits, human impact on the landscape, the rise and fall of civilizations and is even used to solve criminal cases.

Bibliography:

BLYTT, A. (1876): Essay on the Immigration of the Norwegian Flora during Alternating Rainy and Dry Periods. Alb. Cammermeyer, Christiana, Oslo, Norway: 89
HILGEN, F.J. (2010): Astronomical dating in the 19th century. Earth-Science Reviews 98: 65-80
POST, V. L. (1944): The Prospect for Pollen Analysis in the Study of the Earth´s Climate History. New Phytologist Vol. 45: 198-203

In Memoriam

With great consternation I heard about the sudden and tragic death of Dr. Lorenz Keim. I meet him on various field trips and respected him as enthusiastic geologist and able lecturer, dedicated to the divulgation of the newest research dealing with the geology of the Dolomites. He was involved in the preparation of the most recent geological maps of this region and made important contributions for our modern understanding of the diagenesis and geometry of the fossil reefs in the Dolomites and the surrounding stratigraphic framework.