Geopuzzle: What’s the scale?
There have been some great geopuzzles coming out of the ever-growing geoblogosphere the last few months.
I’ve got another one.
We all have hundreds or even thousands of photographs that, to the non-geologist, look like we are showing off our favorite hammer, pencil, or unidentified hand. The first thing we learned on our first field trip was to include a scale in your photograph. Nature has that pesky tendency to create self-similarity.
So … here we go … below is a photograph with scale context cropped out. While it may not be too difficult to get a general sense of scale, I’m looking for someone who can tell me precisely how tall that vertical black line is (lower right of photo). What do you win? Nothing really … I still don’t have those Clastic Detritus t-shirts made.
Good luck!
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Clastic Detritus 
My guess would be 1 cm, but I’m also betting that the scale is misleading. I’m not sure if we’re looking at something
bigger or smaller.
Why’s the apparently fine-grained stuff white? There’s something weird there…
I’ll go for 1 m, just for variety. Do you have a larger photo you could put up, or would that make it too easy to guess?
You’re both wrong … the only clue I’ll give at this point is that it’s somewhere in between 1 cm and 1 m … but you probably knew that already :)
I think I’ll say that it’s 3cm.
10 cm?
somewhere between 1cm and 1m… I think I will split the difference 0.5 m??
Scale sure helps with the interpretation of an image. This could be the atmosphere of Jupiter or a cross section at a beach.
Ed is getting closer …
30 cm.
It looks like an oil tainted sand deposit. I would guess 5cm for scale.
Answer is up here … thanks for playing