Friday Field Foto #13: Permian rocks of the Delaware Mts
April 20, 2007
This is from west Texas (my old master’s degree stompin’ grounds). The Permian Brushy Canyon Formation is the sandstone and siltstone making up the foreground cliffs. In the background, along the skyline, is the Guadalupe Mountains, which is the highest point in Texas.
The geology of this area is very unique in that these mountains expose a shelf, shelf-margin, and basin transition across ~100 km nearly continuously. One of these days, I’ll post some more info about that.
This photo taken by and courtesy of my friend Marieke
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Clastic Detritus 
Aaahh yes, lovely area with some great geology (considering they’re soft rocks). I had the opportunity to spend the first spring break of my grad student years at UW-Madison on a carbonate sedimentology field trip to this area with Lloyd Pray and Toni Simo. If I recall correctly, Lloyd won an Oopps award for his driving on this trip.
Cool! Please tell more about this area.
-Chuck
I’m traveling for the next few days…I will post something more about this area soon…in the mean time here are a few links:
http://www.nps.gov/gumo/
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/guadalupe.html