- Utah’s Glacial Geology
- Utah’s Pleistocene Fossils: Keys for Assessing Climate and Environmental Change
- Glad You Asked: Ice Ages – What are they and what causes them?
- Survey News
- Teacher’s Corner: Teaching Kits Available for Loan
- GeoSights: Glacial Landforms in Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, Salt Lake County, Utah
- Energy News: Uranium – Fuel for the 21st Century?
- New Publications
Tag Archive for: Survey Notes
Nestled in the northwestern corner of Kane County is a geologically unique feature that receives relatively few visitors. Although most people in Utah have seen caves and waterfalls, it is peculiar for a waterfall to emerge from a cave system. Cascade Falls does just that, as an underground river emerges from a deep cave system and cascades down a steep cliff face.
The cave system is the product of sinkholes within the water-soluble rocks of the Claron Formation of the Markagunt Plateau. This incredible cascading waterfall first formed when an ancient lava flow dammed the drainage in a narrow valley, creating Navajo Lake.
Water from this lake found its way through the water-soluble marl (freshwater limestone) of the Claron Formation, eventually forming a cave system that extends a little over a mile from below the southeastern end of Navajo Lake to the Pink Cliffs escarpment at Cascade Falls.
by Mark Milligan
Recent photo of erosion-control terraces constructed by the CCC in the 1930s, above the Bonneville shoreline in North Salt Lake, Davis County.
Sometimes I get a public inquiry that leads to a “Glad You Asked” article, and sometimes I see something interesting in the field and wish I would get a question about it. This time it was a case of the latter.
A gentleman called and asked, “What are the lines up on the side of the mountain?” Along the Wasatch Front we have fault lines, shorelines, lines from rock layers (bedding planes), lines formed by volcanic dikes, and lines formed by other natural phenomena.
- Modeling Ground-Water Flow in Cedar Valley
- Bringing Earth’s Ancient Past to Life
- Ground-Water Monitoring Network
- Energy News: Saline Water Disposal in the Uinta Basin, Utah
- Glad You Asked: How many islands are in Great Salt Lake?
- GeoSights: Fremont Indian State Park, Sevier County, Utah
- Survey News
- New Publications
Upheaval Dome in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, is a colorful circular “belly button,” unique among the broad mesas and deep canyons of the Colorado Plateau.
The rim of Upheaval Dome is 3 miles across and over 1000 feet above the core floor. The central peak in the core is 3000 feet in diameter and rises 750 feet from the floor.
Since the late 1990s, the origin of the Upheaval Dome structure has been considered to be either a pinched-off salt dome or a complex meteorite impact crater; in other words the “belly button” is either an “outie” (dome) or “innie” (crater).
Both origin hypotheses account for the overall structure of Upheaval Dome, assuming approximately a mile of overlying rock has been eroded. The main differences between the two hypotheses are the amount of time and the pressures needed to produce the structure.
*Utah Potash
*Major Oil
*The Mercur District
*Survey News
*Teacher’s Corner
*Energy News: Legislative Directives to the Utah State Energy Program 2009
*Glad You Asked: What are Those Lines on the Mountain? From Bread Lines to Erosion-Control Lines
*GeoSights: Cascade Falls, Kane County
*New Publications
What are those groovy rocks and how did they get that way?
Carole McCalla
On a hike around Lake Blanche below Sundial Peak in Big Cottonwood Canyon, a group of hikers came across long, straight, parallel grooves on a smooth, polished rock surface. Recalling another location where they had seen similar features at the foot of the mountains north of downtown Salt Lake City, they wondered if these markings were formed in the same way. Indeed, what exactly are they and how were they formed?
Although the smooth, grooved surfaces at these two locations are similar, they were actually formed in very different ways.
Does Utah have the biggest natural arch in the world? Yes. Sort of. Depends on your definition of “biggest”.
Mapping geologists with the Utah Geological Survey recently published an article in the May 2009 edition of Survey Notes that attempts to answer that question. “In nearly three decades of working in Utah’s geology, I have been asked many times, ‘What is the largest/longest/biggest arch in the world?'” says Grant Willis, article author and UGS mapping geologist. “For years I told people it was Landscape Arch in Arches National Park.”
Related Links
Natural Arch and Bridge Society Web site
Survey Notes- May 2009 article