Friday Field Foto #53: Armored mud ball
May 30, 2008
I was recently going through all my field photographs from Patagonia while putting together some material for a guidebook and found a nice example of an armored mudball.
Back in February I posted a geopuzzle Friday Field Foto showing a situation where just the armor was left, but the mud had eroded out.
Today’s example is a more straightforward example. This is within a mixed mud-silt-sand matrix-supported conglomerate in the Cretaceous of southern Chile. This is within a complex of clastic injectites, which you can read about here.
Happy Friday!
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Clastic Detritus 
I enjoyed your site very much. I came across what I thought might be armored mud balls in Aroostook County Maine along a river bank. Could these be recently formed? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
TGilley … thanks … yes, indeed, they have been recognized in many modern or geologically-recent sedimentary environments.
I have another post about this here: https://clasticdetritus.com/2008/02/08/friday-field-foto-41/
At the bottom of that post are some links to learning more about these things.
I had found some unusual rings in bedding layers that are likely a lacustrine environment of the early Pennsylvanian. One thought was that they could be the remains of ‘armored mud ball’. They look a little different from the example on your blog. Maybe they are something else. Here’s a link to the question I posted about them
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_these_circle_things_Armoured_Mud_Balls_or_something_else#5722ece4f7b67e21bd6ee7a3
What do you think?