On/in the rocks

On the Zeballos road, I stopped to look at rocks. The roadmakers cut through pale orange and grey rocks; weathered, they splinter into sharp fragments.

Rock, moss, and is that an ant?

Yes, it is. An ant with a white band across the gaster.

And there was a racing spider.

One of the wolf spiders. Very active hunters.

Back to looking at the rock itself; it was mostly this blurry orange and grey mix. Except for one patch:

Stripy insertion

The patch included these strange root-like tangles. As far as I could tell, part of the rock itself. Fossil roots? Or holes in the early molten rock?

I picked up several of the sharp-edged pieces fallen into the ditch. Among them, this; must be a fossil, don't you think? An entire dino?

Must be. On the hood of my car.

Well, okay, maybe my imagination is working overtime. I'll be sensible now. Except; look at him at home!

Pet dino in my cactus garden.

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En camino regresando de Zeballos, me detuve para observar unas rocas. Los que construyeron este camino abrieron paso cortando rocas; estas en tonos de gris claro mezclado con anaranjado. Donde los cambios de temperatura, congelándose y luego deshielándose, las han despedazado, los fragmentos tienen bordes agudos, cortantes.

1. Piedra, musgo, y ¿una hormiguita?
2. Sí, es una hormiga con una franja blanca en el abdomen.
3. Y una araña.
4. Es una de las arañas lobo. Estas arañas no hacen telarañas; persiguen su presa activamente.
5. Pero estaba mirando la roca. Casi toda era esta mezcla de gris con anaranjado, algo borrosa. Pero hay una sección algo diferente.
6. Detalle. Este sector en gris y blanco incluye estas marcas que parecen pedazos de raiz. ¿Serán fósiles? ¿O burbujas en la roca primordial?
7. Recogí algunos de los pedazos de piedra que habían caído a la zanja. Entre ellos, este. Tiene que ser un fósil, ¿no crees? Un dinosaurio completo, ¿no?  Aquí reposando en el capó del motor de mi coche.
8. Bueno, puede ser que me estoy imaginando cosas. Ya dejaré de tonterías. (Pero, ¡míralo en casa, en mi jardincito de cactus!)

Walls and bubbles

 From the "just because" file:

Macro photos of a slice of rock picked up in a local antique shop. The rock, at least, is antique; the slicing and polishing probably not.

Looks like walls of a maze

Trying to imagine what processes would make these patterns

Tubes in bubbles

Again, just because. I can't give a name to this piece of stone; I don't know where it originated, but it intrigues me.

UPDATE: from a comment by Peter Allen in Geology of Vancouver Island (Facebook).

Agate. Silica deposited from an aqueous solution, the lines represent changes in concentration of the solution. The solution was under high temperatures and pressures.

AND UPDATE #2: From a link on the previous comment: Origin..., pg. 19.

As explained above, the mechanism of agate growth is still a mystery to scientists. ... Agates represent one of the most impressive examples of spontaneous pattern generation in the world, and studying agate crystal growth could help explain how natural patterns like these are generated without an external template. Agates are a noteworthy case of self-organization, both texturally and compositionally, and their origin has far-reaching geochemical, crystal-growth, and petrologic implications.

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Del archivo llamado "porque sí": fotos macro de una rebanada de piedra que compré en una tienda de antigüedades. La piedra es antigua; dudo que lo es el trabajo de rebanar y pulir.

Porque sí. No puedo identificar este tipo de piedra. No sé de donde vino, pero me inspira curiosidad.

ACTUALIZANDO: de un comentario por Peter Allen en la página Facebook, Geology of Vancouver Island.

Agata. Sílice depositado desde una solución acuática; las lineas muestran cambios de la concentración de la solución. La solución estaba bajo temperaturas y presiones altas.

Y ACTUALIZANDO UNA VEZ MAS: de un enlace en el comentario citado:

Como se explica arriba, el mecanismo del crecimiento de $gatas sigue siendo un misterio para los científicos. ... Las ágatas son uno de los ejemplos más impresionantes del origen espontáneo de modelo mundiales, y estudiar el crecimiento de los cristales puede ayudar a explicar como es que modelos naturales como estos se generan sin una esquema exterior. Las ágatas son un ejemplo notable de organización autónoma, tanto en su textura como en la composición, y su origen lleva consecuencias importantes en los campos de geoquíica, crecimiento de cristales, y petrológicos.

Scree

I like scree. I like the word; it sounds sharp and jagged, like the stone and rocks it refers to. Scree. The crumbled bones of the earth.

Sometimes the stones are small and gravelly. Sometimes they're mixed with broken branches. Sometimes they're almost square-cut and too heavy to move. On a hillside where I lived some years ago, the cliff face was clay, which oozed in rainy season; after the spring thaw, round rocks pushed their way through the clay and piled up at the bottom.

I stop often to poke around at the bottom of cliffs, cautiously, because the stones are usually unstable, and more overhead are just waiting to fall. Sometimes I bring home a stone or two in my pocket, only to abandon it later. A few end up in my garden.

I liked the pattern on these two rocks at the base of a cliff beside Buttle Lake.

The black stuff looks like tar; shiny, blue-black. But solid, welded to the rock.

Another one.

Scree is a collection of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, volcanoes or valley shoulders that has accumulated through periodic rockfall from adjacent cliff faces. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia gives a list of processes that give rise to scree. Weathering, thermal and topographic stresses, biotic processes (burrowing, etc.). But they forgot this very common one; road building, blasting through rock to make a ledge. Unless that falls under biotic processes, actions by living creatures, in this case us and our earth-moving machines and dynamite.

Most of the scree at the side of the Buttle Lake road is man-made. Down on the shore, the stones are smaller, more uniform in texture and shape, a bit worn down; they've been there since before our time.