Friday 16 May 2014

More Geology than Climbing

I made a short evening trip to Redheugh in Northumberland yesterday. I had hoped to try some of the harder problems there, but I wasn't really feeling it. So despite a nice few problems such as Easier, which is a quite scary font 6a, I spent much of the afternoon checking out the geology. The sandstone here is Fell Sandstone, deposited in a deltaic environment, similar to that of the current day Mississippi delta in America.
Trough Cross Bedding
A bit more trough cross bedding
The cross bedding in the previous two pictures are formed by river channels depositing sediment so building up layers. I didn't have a hand lens with me so I couldn't really tell whether there was any grading but it did give a hint of slight coarsening upwards. The orientation of the cross bedding shows that the palaeo-flow direction was in or out of the crag, however just from this information I couldn't tell whether it was going into or out of the crag.
Iron Concretion, formed diagentically by fluid flow 
Trace fossils
I quite like fossils as they give a sense of what was happening when the sediment was being deposited. The trace fossils here are long thing traces on the left hand side of the small block. These are probably burrows, possibly formed by a worm. 

Something I found 
The Holly tree and Cave 
On my way back to the car I had a quick climb at the Caller Boulders. These seem to be quite neglected and the Main Boulder was totally overgrown, and despite being quite steep didn't have any chalk on them! I climbed two very sandy problems and returned to the car just as it was getting dark.

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