How Do These Odd Tube-Shaped Features Form? Geologist Provides Answers 

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Thank you for that heart of a teacher that you have!

Fanclastic!

My son and I recently passed through N Idaho on a wide return to Santa Barbara from the Texas eclipse (skies cleared with the cooling umbra). We took the Clark Fork route to Sandpoint. What a dream trip for a Willsey, Cook, Zentner student.

Love how the map zooms in to show us where we are. Like Roadcuts. Ty 🤗

Time for morning java and some rock work with Shawn..thanks..

Thx Prof ✌🏻 Excellent geo-adventure , as always. Much appreciated

Thanks Shawn. I enjoy your enthusiasm for teaching - reminds of my son many years ago when he was studying Geology being so enthusiastic while we were flying over the Alps that he couldn’t stop talking about their formation 😁😁😁

Wonderful Shawn. Thank you

Professor, in my professional life as exploration geologist I saw many of those in deep water setting of northern north sea in eocene paleocene sequences. They are named as injectites and behave as ramp/flat/ramp and sourced by continous deep water fans of mainly paleocene age. In 3D you can map their extent and are considered a difficult but exploitable exploration play. Very interesting video also to show the very disturbed silty layers that behave as mini intrusion at metric shale near the main dike

Loved this road cut. Very interesting and cool to look at. Thanks for sharing.

Utah has such awesome landscape . When i was a kid we went to Moab utah and did the parks around that area. My mom didn't know it was against the law at the time, but got a pretty red rock and put it in front yard here in MO. After the first heavy rain it turned into a pile of red sand in her flower garden. lol

Those interesting smaller features you mention at the end of the video make me think there was a dried mud bed, with cracks, when a rain event brought in a flush of the lighter material you see at the top of the features. That material settled into the crack, as well as in a layer on top, eventually capped by later debris deposits. The features are therefore sections though old mud cracks, perhaps.

Thank you for another good video. You might think about doing a video on the so-called petrified forest. Once thought to be actually standing trees thought somehow to have been petrified in a standing position but now because of the observations at Spirit Lake near MT Saint Helens known to have been positioned through flooding and subsequent eruptions.

Speculation that professor Willsey was the original model for "where in the world is Carmen Sandiego" is just that; speculation :)

Some of the most curious rocks I've ever seen look like someone made clay sculptures of pigs-in-a-blanket. The only crazy thing I could imagine forming them was a solidified gopher hole that mud had oozed into and solidified. Seen in a creek bed leading to the St Mary's River on the U.P. of Michigan, near Sault Ste. Marie.

Amazing, thanks very much 👍

Thank you , Shawn for another awesome content and knowledge , shared with us! Keep the safe tracks ! Have a nice time and looking forward for more news on the road!!

Nice professor, thank you

Much like the New Madrid fault zone. Sand blows. And sand volcanoes.

Thanks Shawn

Neat insights…thanks Shawn! 👍

What amazing looking rocks. Thanks.

Fascinating! I really enjoy your tutorials!

i was reading about the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes in northeast Arkansas and they had the same sand boils or volcanoes . very interesting. it must have been terribly frighting for those folks because of their lack of understanding of these geological events .

Thanks!

There were documented sandspouts with the 1868 Hayward Quake too. Interesting to think it looks like that underground. Very interesting!

There's video of these sand boils spitting up in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, an example of the process of liquefaction. If we were to go back to these sand boils eons later and the ground eroded around them they'd look just like these clastic dikes, because that's how clastic dikes form. Decades ago the process of liquefaction was a foreign concept to me -- how the ground after an earthquake can turn to soup -- but we also tend not to stop to think of how much _water_ is in the aquifers below our feet, and during an earthquake all that groundwater sloshes around like a bathtub and anywhere the pressure of that sloshing water can find a weakness in the overlying soil, there you'll find a sand boil/clastic dike. Quite often the ground above the aquifer is porous/permeable enough where the sediment layers themselves become saturated -- enough to where groundwater can ooze out across acres of ground. Few examples of that in other videos of the Japan quake. Fascinating to look at, and fascinating to see some of the end result ⬆

Very interesting location. The squiggly lines are similar to the features on one of you Random Roadcuts. Thanks again Shawn for the videos.

Great love your programs iam learning more all the time thank you you make it so very interesting

5:03 Correct Christchurch the area is an old swamp land so tick for perfect conditions along with a 6.5M earthquake that had a peak acceleration 2.2G juggled up all the sand.

Wonderful occurance Shawn! Thanks for sharing

Thank you Professor.

So this is what liquefaction looks like underground? 👀

Great explanation. Thx for posting.

Love the geology in southern Utah. I am always fascinated by the mechanisms causing injectites. Thanks for another great video. Hope we cross paths in the field someday or maybe GSA?

Nice to learn about beautiful rock formations!

Thanks for all of your hard work man!

Always a pleasure.

Fascinating stuff, thank you.

The horizontal features are amazing. You said "not sure what's going on with that", so its time to don your geologist's hat :)

Awesome features. Thank you shawn

I sure wouldn’t want to be standing around when one of those goes off.

Very cool!

Interesting. When you started the video I would have bet that the Entrada formation is metamorphic and that dike was of igneous origin, just from the looks of it. Boy, was I wrong there.

These sand boils were also mentioned in relation to the great New Madrid earthquake.

There is a similar feature on the short arm of the White canyon, upper end of Lake Powell. It is a free-standing, somewhat cylindrical pillar that to me looks like a fossilized artesian spring. You can spot it on Google maps: N 37d 48.409' W 110 d 23.784'. Now that the lake is so low it is hard to get to by water. I have never tried by land; Long arm of White canyon is a slot canyon hike though.

Great video! Thank you for this concise explanation of a very unique geologic feature. I just had one question: I understand that there needed to be a "triggering event" to move the sediments upward through the Entrada, but wouldn't there *also* need to be somewhat of a conduit like a fault or a fracture to facilitate the upward movement of sediment? Sediments aren't just going to move through solid, unbroken layers of mudstone without first exploiting a weakness in the mudstone layers such as a fault. Is my reasoning completely off base?

I was hoping you would tell us those white marks were hieroglyphics, beautiful layers.

I wonder if it can be calculated, what magnitude of a quake that sand-water intrusion generated?

Hey Shawn, I liked the video and the topic. Clastic dikes are interesting features of sedimentary sequences. Baring local facies changes, I've always known the Carmel Formation to be a reddish brown colored formation of siltstone and muddy sandstone. It looks much like the formation that hosted the clastic dike. You pointed down sequence to some light gray or buff-colored sandstone that you said was the Carmel Fm. Are you sure you have your local stratigraphy correct? The underlying light-colored sandstone is obviously the source material for the clastic dike. But are you sure the underlying sandstone is not the Navajo Sandstone, which has intruded the overlying Carmel Formation? In fact, I suspect that the quartz-rich sands and fine pebbles of the Navajo Sandstone likely were intruded upward through both the overlying Carmel and Entrada Formations. As you state, the aquifer in the Navajo Sandstone was saturated and under pressure from the weight of the overlying finer-grained sedimentary deposits.

Is that similar to liquefaction? Except with sand, rather than water?

Is there any way of dating the ''injected'' slurry... and comparing that date to a date found for the surrounding sedimentary rock?

Another indication of an igneous dike is adjacent thermal contact metamorphism, which changed the mineralogical appearance and texture of the host rock.

Myron did a video on these too.

Maybe it's an underwater geothermal chimney; Well, that place was under the sea eons ago.

Was there something similar in New Madrid area?

The 2001 6.8 Nisqually earthquake caused sand boils to appear in the Duwamish area of Seattle.

None of those here in uk amazing

Mud spews like the descriptions of the New Madrid earthquake series?

So, Natures version of a "frack out"?

Look like fracking from underneath❤

Are you sure it’s not a “grabboid “ tunnel filled in?😅

❤❤❤

Are these like the “pinnacles” in Kodachrome state park

So couldn't this have been a (type of) Yellostone hot mud pit, with bubbling mud, gasses, and eventually these all filled in and look lilke these dikes. Or there was a massive earthquake, liquifaction, and then shoot upward like a mud volcano going off. Both sound valid,

There is a term of art that creationists (and their so-called "Flood Geologists) use to identify these structures that vertically cross cut sedimentary layers, but I can't recall the word at this moment. It is not an accepted geologic term (although it 'sounds' scientific, by golly). It is supposed to "prove" that all the sedimentary layers found throughout the world are a result of Noah's Flood and were all laid down in the matter of days to months about 6,000 years ago. The argument goes: Darwinist geologists claim that it takes hundreds of years for a layer of sediment to accumulate, and yet these fossil trees were buried in a matter of weeks and before the wood could rot. 🙄🙄 This proves that Noah's Flood happened and that the soft layers (like in the Grand Canyon) were carved out in a matter of days when the flood waters drained back into "The Fountains of The Deep." Some of the best EXCAVATED examples (in my opinion) of what you are presenting here can be found at the beautiful and spectacular Kodachrome State Park not too far from Bryce and the Coxcomb.

It would seem that if you could find the top of a dike that you could come up with a relative date?