|
|
| Saturday, 21-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share |  | Bookmark |
|
Home is home to more than we might like at times
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Friday, 20-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
What's this, a stick in the eye?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Thursday, 19-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Sandstone from Port Wing, Wisconsin
|
|
Sandstone - take a beautiful beach covered with nice clean white sand. All the grains of sand are the same size without any foreigh objects mixed in. And lets say it is 100 feet thick. Now bury it beneath many thousands of feet of additional mud, sand, rock and water. Let it set in place for a few million years give or take and then dig it up. If certain conditions were present, the sand grains are all cemented together and form a very solid rock called sandstone. If you look at it with a hand lens, you can see the individual sand grains. And if you rub it, usually a few grains will pop out into your hand.
Same setting except this time there are lots of storms in the area and torrential rains wash everything onto the beech. Erosion is rapid in the uplands. Instead of uniform sand grains, some larger grains are washed in along with some pebbles and small rocks. From yesterdays quiet area where some fines have settled out as clay, the area is washed away as well and the clay sticks together as we all know if you have every walked in a wet clay area. Sticky stuff.
In this sample, you can see the various sizes of the grains. Some very fine grains are mixed with larger sand grains and some small pebbles. Even the clay exists in the stone and one is able to scrap it away with your finger nail. If you are looking for a nice uniform sandstone, this one fails. However, it is well cemented together and would make a good building block. Some people would not appreciate the variation in composition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Tuesday, 17-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Someone said summer was around the corner???
|
|
|
This morning in St. Cloud, MN
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Monday, 16-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Polished rocks
|
|
|
In the St. Louis River bed below the Thomson Dam
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Sunday, 15-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Water over the Thomson Dam
|
 |
|
Thomson Dam
|
|
 |
|
Over the rocks
|
|
|
|
The St. Louis River flows south from the Iron Range towards Jay Cooke State Park south of Carlton, MN. The Thomson Dam blocks it's flow near Carlton. The rocks in Jay Cooke State Park provide some very unique river bed material. Hopefully I can visit this area this summer and come back with some pictures.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Saturday, 14-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Tree flowers
|
|
|
I believe this was a Black Spruce but it may have been a White Spruce. I did not spend enough time to determine which species it was.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Friday, 13-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Trilliums and ripples
|
|
|
The trilliums were blooming in the valley east of Sandstone, MN on Wednesday. Early by my calculations but pretty none the less. And we found these ripple marks in the sandstone of the area. These represent ripple marks like you may observe today in a shallow sandy bottom creek. The ripples were covered with a different material that formed a weak bond to the sand below. Once the entire deposit was buried and solidified, the ripples remained intact. Eventually the sand turned into sandstone and was exposed today through weathering. The top layer of material popped off leaving the originally ripples for us to see today. These were likely deposited some 500 million years ago. Maybe older. We were looking at the Hinckley Sandstone formation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Thursday, 12-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
Lake Superior
|
|
|
I was to the south shore of Lake Superior today at the small community of Port Wing in Wisconsin. We were looking for an old sandstone quarry and we found it. But standing on the shore with a 20 mph wind at 44 degrees blowing out of the northeast made it a less than perfect day to be standing around taking pictures.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Wednesday, 11-May-2005 00:00 |
Email | Share | | Bookmark |
|
LP Blueberries
|
|
|
The final mural from Ely is this portrait of blue berries on the side of a 10,000 gallon porpane tank.
|
|
|
|
