Questioning the Ice Ages

[GaryN]

Interesting hole in the bedrock of Todd Creek, a seasonal creek that empties into the Sooke river. Depth as yet unknown as I could not see the bottom. It appears to corkscrew into the bedrock. It is at the base of a small waterfall, more like a spillway, but obviously has not filled with material that would have been expected to have washed down the creek over thousands of years. The pool that contains the pothole contains no pebbles or rocks at all, and the exit which is quite narrow has no rocks trapped in it, so either the hole has swallowed it all, or no material has ever moved down the creek. There are a number of what might be called mini-cirques along the creek bed, interspersed with deep V shaped gulleys.
The features in the creek, IMO, defy any plausible mechanical process of formation, and I'm going to do a web page about this location alone. I have put out feelers, and am now trying to set up an appointment with a member of a family of 3 generations of geologists who have worked mostly on southern Vancouver Island. I have not made direct contact yet, but have been informed he is "very opinionated", sounds like just the type of fellow I need to offer (perhaps) a reality check on my visions of extreme energy, short duration geology.

I have a few more images on Picassa.
https://plus.google.com/photos/11334575 ... 3052293025

[seasmith]

[GaryN]

[GaryN]

[GaryN]

The pothole pictured at the top of this page turns out to be 18 feet deep, perhaps 19 in spots. I couldn't find (with a fishing line and weight) anywhere where it might have continued down, and don't know if it might have any sideways leading passage. I'll try taking a million candle power lamp next time, as the Sun never gets completely overhead in order to be able to see down there.
I did a day trip up the creek that has the pothole in it, and got about 1 kilometre before I had to start heading back. That doesn't sound very far, but the higher I went, the more rugged it became, and finding a way past obstructions like big boulders and log jams really slowed things down. Still, I have seen enough to be 100% convinced that this creek was not from glaciers or water, and had no faults, dikes, graben or any other standard geological features that I could see.
What I did find though, and my explanation of said feature, I'll have to post in a NIAMI thread, though I'm going to say it is a New Insight rather than a Mad Idea. Electro Magnetic Geomorphology!

[seasmith]

Just a wild guess from the photo, but is that a basaltic/igneous rock stream bed, with a sedimentary type cliff face on the right ?

[GaryN]

Tough to tell there s. I did find a pdf file on the Brule geology, best to search TOPOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY OF THE. BRULE to find it. Where I am, the rock can have so many appearances that I can't tell what it is, but I suspect those changes were very rapid. Some of it may be only skin deep, its like it has been case hardened, so tough that the water flows over supposedly thousands of years have not made the slightest impression of it.
On my last creek bed hike I found a number of what I call creation events, where it is clear that the boulders are being formed deep in the creek bed, and there are boulders close by that would be classed as deep metamorphic, but were created, IMO, very close to where they now lay. The observation that most impressed me was the seeming solution to the presence of large chunks of rock that almost fill thee whole creek bed. How did they get there? Again, the answer is they were formed right there, and have never moved. This image, looking down stream, shows a large chunk with the remains of rock that was behind the chunk, which itself was originally part of a long ridge sitting in the middle of the creek.( There are similar features in various stages of formation to be found along the creek) In some places it seems the ridge was eaten away completely, and a long thin pool or deep V trench left in its place.

I thought the whiteish coating on the rocks was some biological film that dried out when the water level fell, but on closer inspection it isn't. I picked up a sample, and underneath it is a reddish-brown colour, the white is only on exposed surfaces, and I suspect is from a 'flash' of plasma. I'll see if I can get it analysed somewhere to try and determine it's chemical composition, and that of the rest of the rock.

[seasmith]

G,
On your treks, do you occasionally carry a pair of safety glasses, rock hammer, small 10x jewelers glass and maybe a cheap pocket rock-hound guide ?
Sure beats lugging them lithos back to to the lab...


http://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Guide-Rock ... B005OL87ZU

[GaryN]

[seasmith]

re your Devil's Kettle Falls

My last two posts were prompted by similar looking creek ravines, in the breaks of SW Utah.
I'm not trying to discount your theories, only to consider more of the data. No matter the working premise, it helps to discriminate sedimentary from igneous (or possibly metamorphic) materials, when appraising geologic features,
imho.
I'll stop pestering...

[GaryN]

[GaryN]

[seasmith]

[GaryN]

[mileso]

It took me a few days to read through the posts but someone back around page eight mentioned “cavitation”. This brought to mind the damage I had seen done to cast iron pipe fittings we were disposing of on a job.

What I found so remarkable was the way the metal had been eroded. It was as if worms had burrowed into the metal, leaving deep winding holes, some contained foreign material lodged in them. This was clearly not the result of chemical etching as the water that ran through these pipes had been treated (buffered) to prevent corrosion.

On a much larger scale, I witnessed the effect of cavitation on a spillway at a hydroelectric dam in Labrador. The dam being constructed of reinforced concrete poured on top of granite which had been blasted to expose virgin rock. In this case the granite that had been subjected to the cavitation effect was smoothed out as if it had been struck by blows from a ball-pean hammer. Concave flakes had been removed making the surface as smooth as the glaciated rock prior to blasting.

As I found out later, this was an emergency overflow and all this damage happen in a one time event that lasted a few days. I wish I had taken photographs.