Any geologists in the crowd?

One of the launchsites I go to, Snow Ranch, has these weird (to me) rocks all over the place. I've never seen them anywhere else. Any idea what they are? They range in size from very small to very large. And I'm wondering if the black spots are carbon.

At first glance it looks like a breccia of some sort... (sorta like moon rocks). Course quite a few of the moon rocks were breccias consisting of partially melted and re-solidified rubble from meteor impacts welded together into new rock...

Of course I'm not a geologist, just an interested observer... LOL Is it maybe a sandstone with the black inclusions? The gray part looks to be quite grainy, which to me looks like a sandstone (our Shiner farm has a lot of sandstone, and the sandy soil is mostly weathered out sandstone, which is a sedimentary deposit-- the entire area sits on top of the Ouchita Mountains, which is one of the oldest mountain chains on Earth-- which were worn down aeons ago and now lie under a few thousand feet of sandstone deposits which form the surface today.)

Take your rock and pick at it with a knife... if the aggregate is sandstone, it will scratch pretty easily and release the glued-together sand grains. If the black inclusions are carbon, they'll be quite soft-- carbon can easily be scratched with a knife and liberate black dust/bits. If the black inclusions are very hard and resist chipping or scratching, they're most likely not carbon, but something much harder... possibly basalt or some other igneous rock. It might be a volcanic deposit as well, with hard black inclusions of basalt or something like that in a lighter pumice-like substrate gluing it all together...

That's about all I can tell you... If you don't find anything here, you can always do some internet searching on the geology of your area, or check at the local library-- I found some interesting geological maps in our library including a county-wide soil survey that shows where the most fertile soils are-- a very good thing to know for a farmer when considering renting a field!

One other thought... PM mrgneissguy here on the forum... he's a trained geologist and not just an enthusiastic amateur...

Good luck! OL JR

luke strawwalker said:

One other thought... PM mrgneissguy here on the forum... he's a trained geologist and not just an enthusiastic amateur...

Good luck! OL JR

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Well, a geologist that has spent the last 14 years working with soil and groundwater instead of rock, but yes, I am a geologist.

First, I should say it's tough to tell by picture, it's a lot easier by looking at it live and in person, holding it, heck...sometimes tasting it. At first glance, my initial thought was also breccia. But at a closer look, I don't think that's it. For one thing, the grains are too rounded (they should be more angular). My honest opinion, and I did get a concurring second opinion from a fellow geologist who's office is next to mine, is that it's what we refer to as urbanite. Just based on the photos, it looks like it is not natural rock, but possibly chunks of old concrete or something similar, the black portions maybe asphalt. I also notice some fibrous material on it. Is that scattered throughout, or just part of a cloth or something you wrapped it with?

I could be way off base with that assessment though. As I said, it's a lot easier when you have more than just a picture.

I noticed the fiber too but figured it was from something it had been laying on either on the ground or in storage... sorta looks embedded though...

Good to know I haven't COMPLETELY lost it... LOL

"urbanite" huh... Interesting. Sometimes I find pavement on the beach that's been rolled and rounded in the surf... makes some weird looking rocks! Found a BIG (rougly 8-10 inch "cube") of coal on the beach one time. I've got some interesting stuff... some ammonite fossils (about 12 inches across) that my Pa-Pa found working in the oil patch and/or hauling gravel decades ago... also have some petrified wood-- one piece is from a tree stump and is about 2 feet tall, complete with vines/roots of something growing on it when it was fossilized (like a rotting tree stump in a forest today). Have some smaller chunks as well. Got some river rocks (limestone) from west Texas, including some with holes "drilled" through them caused by small rocks being spun in a hollow in the rock under rapids or a waterfall. Evidently, my 6 year old inherited the "bug" from me about rocks-- we have a fairly decent little collection going. From the time she could walk, she HAD to have a rock wherever she stopped... she'd just pick up a random rock or pebble and take it with us... ended up with a gravel bed in the floor/backseat of the pickup! We have several chunks of pumice from Capulan Mountain in New Mexico, a chunk of granite from the top of Pike's Peak, some well rounded "cannonballs" of pink granite and black basalt from the BIL's cornfields in Indiana, obviously rolled smooth and round under a glacier... even have some sulphur "rocks" from the old sulphur company near here... they pumped pressurized water at 800 degrees + underground through injection wells to melt the sulphur formations a few hundred feet underground (on top of the salt dome) and then recovered the hot water and liquified sulphur from a recovery well, piped it back to the "power house" that then separated the sulphur from the water and returned the hot water back to the injection well. The old sulphur company (Texas Gulf Sulphur) ran round-the-clock when I was a kid-- in fact one of my earliest memories was the constant rumble and the chain on the door of our house had worn a deep groove into the trim board from rattling back and forth constantly for years. They shut down in the late 70's... used to love watching those trains of short tank cars rocking back and forth down the tracks as they shipped out loads of molten or dissolved sulphur. (Sometimes they rocked back and forth so violently you'd swear they were about to jump off the tracks!) The tanker cars were short (because the sulphur is very heavy and dense) and painted black, but were invariably stained a bright yellow in a big 'splash' pattern around the tank fill dome from spills as they were filled with liquid sulphur. In the decades before that, they had accumulated the sulphur as a solid-- HUGE blocks of the stuff, stacked like bricks, forming a HUGE pile the size of several football fields and at least 50 feet high... usually with powdered sulphur inside. In fact, the local bank had a vignette on all their checks with a picture of the TGS smokestacks and power house, the huge sulphur pile, and a cotton boll and cattle head as their "emblem" for years and years (til they got bought out about a decade ago and the new company changed it to the standard "McBank" crapola stuff they use now...) We were buying hay from a guy who rented the open land around the sulphur wells down there for hay meadows, and we had permission to drive in and get the hay off the fields. While we were waiting for him to show up and load us out one day, I was walking around looking at stuff and wandered over to a pipeline. They had all these pipelines paralleling the roads, up about 3 feet off the ground on small stanchions, periodically dipping down through a culvert tube with a pile of dirt/gravel over it for vehicle crossings... The pipeline (about 4-6 inch) was heavily insulated with either fiberglass or asbestos jacketed with a thin aluminum sheet. Periodically there were valves or other connections that were largely uninsulated. At one of them, evidently there was a pinhole leak, and the extremely hot pressurized water and the dissolved/molten sulphur in it would weep out of the seal, and the steam evaporated into the air, depositing the sulphur behind like a giant stalactite which grew off the side of the pipe down to the ground. Periodically someone with a sledgehammer would come and shatter the thing, to keep it from overloading and bending or breaking the pipe, leaving a massive pile of shattered sulphur stalactite 'rocks' behind. I picked a few up and brought them home.

Neat stuff... Enjoy fiddling with rocks... OL JR

MrGneissGuy said:

Well, a geologist that has spent the last 14 years working with soil and groundwater instead of rock, but yes, I am a geologist.

First, I should say it's tough to tell by picture, it's a lot easier by looking at it live and in person, holding it, heck...sometimes tasting it. At first glance, my initial thought was also breccia. But at a closer look, I don't think that's it. For one thing, the grains are too rounded (they should be more angular). My honest opinion, and I did get a concurring second opinion from a fellow geologist who's office is next to mine, is that it's what we refer to as urbanite. Just based on the photos, it looks like it is not natural rock, but possibly chunks of old concrete or something similar, the black portions maybe asphalt. I also notice some fibrous material on it. Is that scattered throughout, or just part of a cloth or something you wrapped it with?

I could be way off base with that assessment though. As I said, it's a lot easier when you have more than just a picture.

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Waaaaay back in 1994 I got a degree in Geology and while I haven't used it since (been in road/sewer construction for the last 12 years) I seem to remember somewhere seeing conglomerates looking sorta like this. I think in conglomerates the larger peices are more rounded whereas breccia are more angular. Also reminds me of the bi-modal (is that the right term?) glacial conglomerates we would see in class but the sandy grains sure don't look small enough for that. If it's urbanite I'd sure like to see the process that'd cause that and in particularly large quantities.

But like you said, it's a photo. Tough to tell from that.

-Dave

I hadn't thought of conglomerates. That's a possibility.

Northern California...Snow Ranch...if I get time between meetings I'll try to find that area online and see if I can't find some reference that discusses the regional geology. If you have some more specific info, nearby city, GPS coordinates to the site, or something like that you're comfortable giving out, I or someone else here might be able to narrow down the possibilities.

Knowing the geologic environment might help more than looking at the picture.

Don't taste them, they could be Coprolites!!! :y:

It's cookie dough left over by the aliens that built Atlantis a few millenia ago....



-Kevin

If it's cookie dough, would they taste "Out of this world"?

First off...Coprolites is actually the name of my fantasy football team...I had a blast with the logo.

Through the wonders of Google, I think I’ve got the location down, at least if I’ve found the right Snow Ranch in Northern California …and the website references LUNAR and the Snow Ranch Spaceport, so I think it's a good possibility.

Also through the wonders of Google, I found the 2010 Geologic Map of California. Putting the two together, it appears your launch site is sitting on Miocene sandstone, shale, conglomerate, and fanglomerate.

So the conglomerate is a very strong possibility. And yeah, given the location, I think it highly unlikely that you would find such large sections of urbanite there. I think, so far, Dave has presented the most likely answer.

As to what the black parts are, it's hard to say. There seems to be a lot of volcanic and ultramafic rocks in northern California. Based on some of the other geologic units in the area, I'd say maybe basalt. But that's just a guess.

MrGneissGuy said:

I think, so far, Dave has presented the most likely answer.

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Woohoo! What do I win? Is it time to start busting out geology jokes yet?

It's a gneiss rock, don't take it for granite.

Mmmmmkay I'll stop now...

-Dave

Ok...you just moved from the grease pit next to the outhouse to the quarry.

H_Rocket said:

Ok...you just moved from the grease pit next to the outhouse to the quarry.

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Awww...I upset the LDRS31 parking attendant again.

Geologists make the bed-rock.

Speaking of urbanite...

There's a guy in Shiner who covered his burial plot in some strange looking red and black "rock-like" material. Turns out it was chipped up crap off his roof when he had it redone-- he had the guys spread it on his burial plot rather than buy some gravel...

Man some of those old Germans are TIGHTWADS!!!

Heck he's one of the richest guys in town... he'd just had his plot enclosed with a blue-gray granite "curb" all the way around it... even with the family name inscribed into the "threshold" into the plot... then dumps red-n-black roof rock onto the plot rather than spring for some matching gray gravel...

Guess that's how those old Germans got all their money... Grandpa used to say they still had their first dollar under the mattress somewhere... I believe it! LOL

Later! OL JR

I always thought that the term was coprolith.

Coprolites? Aren't they the formations that were left on the field in ancient Greece after the Hoplites broke camp?

MarkII said:

I always thought that the term was coprolith.

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Wow, who'd have thought we'd be giving poo lessons. If a coprolith becomes fossilized, it is a coprolite.

Mark II was close though, lots of people mistake them for Schist!!!

MrGneissGuy said:

Wow, who'd have thought we'd be giving poo lessons. If a coprolith becomes fossilized, it is a coprolite.

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And if they are completely fossilized, them there really isn't any "copro" material left in them anymore, right?

So is this stuff tuff?

MarkII said:

So is this stuff tuff?

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Looks pretty tuff...Also looks like concrete.