Location Taken: Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: March 2010
I’ve been reading about rocks lately, so look at this lovely shale!
See how the rock has broken off in thin slivers? You only find that with rocks with a thin lamination. Oh wait, jargon. Really thin layers of rock all of the same type, breaks off easily into sheets. And, obviously, slivers. They’re each a few inches long, to give you scale.
This particular rock wall is right by the large Ithaca Falls. The water’s carved a small canyon into the shale hills, with steep cliffs made completely out of this fantastic shale. Shale’s a sedimentary rock, built up over long periods of time as more and more mud gets dumped on one spot, compacting the whole mass down until it fuses into rock. There’s all sorts of variables that make mud turn into shale versus mudstone versus sandstones versus all the other possibilities.
This, however, is a beautiful shale, and the combination of glaciers carving away the upper rock in the last ice age and waterfalls carving into the rock have made it marvelously visible for any to see.
