Friday Field Foto #44: Patterns in the beach

Way back in Friday Field Foto #4, I showed a photograph of some interesting patterns in a California beach. I find these mini-sedimentary systems very pleasing to look and it’s one of my favorite things to do at the beach.

The field trip I went on last week in Tierra del Fuego looked at some beach-cliff exposures of Miocene rocks. We arrived as the tide was going out … the tidal range there is quite large … I forget how much, but once it hit the flats, it shot out nearly a kilometer in less than an hour. The result was an expansive sandy tidal flat with countless nooks and crannys of these mini-sedimentary systems and more ripples than you could possibly see before the tide came back.

Here are a few photographs.

Happy Friday!

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