Big Spencer Flat, Goethite Seams, and Moqui Marbles

[1dave]

I wanted to pull some images from RTH for my thread on Big Disturbances in the force -
forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/82803/great-disturbances-force, but couldn't find it.

I posted it on at least 4 sites most of them have gone the way of the world, but apparently not posted here. Retrification time!



Big Spencer Flat is about 12 miles East of Escalante Utah. Take State road 12 out of town and drive just past mile marker # 13 as I recall. Looking at the area on Google earth, they have placed a cattle guard just after the turn off on what used to be the Old Sheffield Road - now BLM -103, making it easier to see. That road leads into the middle of Big Spencer Flat.



Too bad I didn't know about the Red Breaks until now. I would have loved to explore them back in the day when I had the energy to do it.







When I first visited the area in 1988, the top of one of the hills looked like this:




I returned in 1997 There had been a lot of erosion. The hill now looked like this:





I returned in 1999 with a couple of my daughters. There had been even more erosion.







I returned again in 2001 with Robert Eves of the SUU Geology Department. Even more erosion. I wonder if there is any of the hill left any more.







Yes, as of 2016 there is still a nub.

[1dave]

When I first visited the area I thought WOW! A large meteorite hit this place!

over time I realized a LOT of water under pressure must have spewed out in places to form these pipes.





I am wondering now if they weren't formed 154 million years ago when the Upheaval Comet struck by Moab northeast of here, pressurizing the ground water. Perhaps that had something to do with the formation of the "marbles" also.



A Moqui I sawed in half.



The inside of a shell:



I sent some of the Moqui's to a scientist in the Netherlands who was studying their local "Rattle stones" that are similar. His report back was that the layers began as limonite, but as they dried out, they changed to goethite.

[1dave]

Where a lot of water was forced out pipes developed.



and Liesegang lines of varying thickness.



Along the planes where the liesegange lines formed, the Moqui Marbles grew.



The plane fed the Moquis, either leaving a band around the middle of them



or making them look like flying Saucers.



in my 1997 trip near the road I found the "mushroom area." There, the top grew more than the bottom on all of them. Here they are shown upside down.







a few more photos from our 1999 trip.

[1dave]

Kord Ernstson informed me that the same thing (except the pipes) happened in the sandstone around the Ries Impact Crater in Germany.

[1dave]

The moqui's formed in layer after layer - apparently pulse after pulse.





A closer look at the center of the one I sawed in half reveals that the first pulse coated specific sand grains while ignoring those around them. The next pulse filled in the outer ring that protected the inner grain from receiving another layer. Later pulses repeatedly coated the outermost layers.








What caused the separation? Magnetic Repulsion?
There are bits of calcite. Do they have something to do with why they formed in spheres with ever changing spaces between them?

Iron laden water spurted up joints in the sandstone, filling them with goethite.



When the pressure became too much, water spurted out of the sandstone margin edges, forming the pipes.





Erosion left huge chunks of goethite like this laying around, but within a couple of years, even they were gone.

[1dave]

My Old Grey Matter ain't what it used to was, so I've made a (hopefully) final run through - additions  and corrections to this thread, closing it with my BIGGEST PUZZLE.

Why did the iron show such selectivity - selecting specific sand grains, ignoring others, and ending up with spherical structures? Magnetic Attraction/Repulsion?





www.explainthatstuff.com/piezoelectricity.html

What is piezoelectricity?

Squeeze certain crystals (such as quartz) and you can make electricity flow through them. The reverse is usually true as well: if you pass electricity through the same crystals, they "squeeze themselves" by vibrating back and forth. That's pretty much piezoelectricity in a nutshell but, for the sake of science, let's have a formal definition:

Piezoelectricity (also called the piezoelectric effect) is the appearance of an electrical potential (a voltage, in other words) across the sides of a crystal when you subject it to mechanical stress (by squeezing it).

In practice, the crystal becomes a kind of tiny battery with a positive charge on one face and a negative charge on the opposite face; current flows if we connect the two faces together to make a circuit. In the reverse piezoelectric effect, a crystal becomes mechanically stressed (deformed in shape) when a voltage is applied across its opposite faces.

What causes piezoelectricity?

Think of a crystal and you probably picture balls (atoms) mounted on bars (the bonds that hold them together), a bit like a climbing frame. Now, by crystals, scientists don't necessarily mean intriguing bits of rock you find in gift shops: a crystal is the scientific name for any solid whose atoms or molecules are arranged in a very orderly way based on endless repetitions of the same basic atomic building block (called the unit cell). So a lump of iron is just as much of a crystal as a piece of quartz. In a crystal, what we have is actually less like a climbing frame (which doesn't necessarily have an orderly, repeating structure) and more like three-dimensional, patterned wallpaper.

Diagram showing the regular arrangement of atoms in a crystalline solid.

Artwork: What scientists mean by a crystal: the regular, repeating arrangement of atoms in a solid. The atoms are essentially fixed in place but can vibrate slightly.

In most crystals (such as metals), the unit cell (the basic repeating unit) is symmetrical; in piezoelectric crystals, it isn't. Normally, piezoelectric crystals are electrically neutral: the atoms inside them may not be symmetrically arranged, but their electrical charges are perfectly balanced: a positive charge in one place cancels out a negative charge nearby. However, if you squeeze or stretch a piezoelectric crystal, you deform the structure, pushing some of the atoms closer together or further apart, upsetting the balance of positive and negative, and causing net electrical charges to appear. This effect carries through the whole structure so net positive and negative charges appear on opposite, outer faces of the crystal.

The reverse-piezoelectric effect occurs in the opposite way. Put a voltage across a piezoelectric crystal and you're subjecting the atoms inside it to "electrical pressure." They have to move to rebalance themselves—and that's what causes piezoelectric crystals to deform (slightly change shape) when you put a voltage across them.

So PRESSURE put electro-magnetic forces to work!

[1dave]

In the early 1960's I was working as a "Communications Engineer," designing and supervising construction of rural telephone systems in small Utah towns.

One day before John Kennedy was assassinated, my boss loaded me into a Piper airplane, flew out to Escalante and pointed to a power pole beside state route 12 and told me to "survey a power line to that oil well" as we flew over it. He gave me two high school kids to work with and a Volkswagen bus.





The best part of the job was the beautiful pet wood I found as we surveyed the line.

Just north and west of the town of Escalante the Navajo sandstone has worn away down to the Chinle formation which of course contains Pet Wood. Since that time, the area to the north of Escalante has been designated as a state park.

[1dave]

Why only selected grains were coated with iron?



Why the Pipes?

DUH! The answer has been staring me in the face for the past 30 years.

90 miles away the Upheaval impact occurred 150 million years ago.

The billions of shock and reflection waves only had a short way to go before they started collapsing spaces between sand grains and forcing water out in huge amounts through every joint and forcing new paths near rock margins.

Elastic waves squeezed the quartz crystals, generating electromagnetic waves that selectively were attracted and repelled creating Liesegang bands and spheres.

WHY Spheres jammed so closely together? Now I finally know.