Close To The Ground

Yeah, I got here eventually, mere months after I started writing this. What can you do? It's a bit disjointed - not unexpected with it being put together piecemeal - but I've finally just thought 'Enough! Post it!'. And so, for your aid against persistent insomnia;



There is more to Hope's Nose than heart-bursting slopes, banana-skin rocks, and tangled bushes.

I don't just mean the seawatching, either.


As the litter-flinging scum neither know nor care, the place is a SSSI and deservedly so. Coastal temperate limestone flora, and never mind a certain period of geological time.*. The Geopark thing [which is good for.. what? Council bods getting junkets, a few signs, and a playpark, it seems...] is I suppose to be mentioned too.


But there is more. Things too small or too big to notice. Things under foot or over there, lost in the foreground or the background. These are things about which I burble now.



Now, I know bugger all about fancy plants [[and very little about fancy ants, so maybe don't try any...]], thus these are just cute little things that caught my eye while I was drooling over load structures;

Told you they were teeny

Clotted cream coloured wotsits

Raspberry ripple coloured wotsits

Very pretty little whatevertheyares.



Time for something completely different [and admittedly, not very close to the ground];

YIKES!

It's the Loch Nose Monster!!

Aka..

 A Grey Seal.

Here's another one;

"Feeeeeeeeed meeeeee??"

Frequently seen stalking the anglers in the hope of being able to look cute enough to get thrown spare fish [there's a quota. Really].


Stalking the brambles [even further from the ground..] way back in Summer, was this;

Volucella zonaria,
aka Yellow-nosed Thingy

A pretty good Hornet mimic

I don't have any good, or indeed any Adder piccies to show you, but they're around. As are the ubiquitous Lizard!s.



Ok, enough prevarication, have a look at this;

Palaeoripples!
Dinky ickle ones

And this!

Lovely little flame
[upper right]

Told you I was looking at load structures.


This is actually a nice [albeit small] piece of geology here, and as I know most people go 'whatever' at best, I'll be very brief and then you can skip past the boring grey and brown bits, ok?
'The grey stuff landed on the brown stuff all at once while the brown stuff was still soft - it being seabed, not rock yet - and so some of the brown stuff kinda squirted up into the grey stuff, like if you smacked your hand down on wet mud.'


For those of you who are interested, please note the erosive surface above the 10p, said unit being slightly coarser than that below, and the rip-up clasts therein. One might speculate about the exact relationship between the sand and the overlying mass flow. Oh, speaking of, look at this; 

Fossils!
[If you can make them out]

Massive [technically, not physically!] limestone unit with abundant brachiopods and bivalves. Most likely a reef slump; those animals are mostly intact but not in situ [poor things..].


More fossiliferous fun;

Ooooh

Aaaaah

Yes, those are what they look like

Stepping away from the palaeontology and scaling up a bit..

Older and further away,

Meadfoot Slate beds at Sandy Cove

Quartz veining spreading up from a sandstone bed

Quartz veining is a common sight around Devon - unsurprising given the whole 'massive granitic batholith' thing - but the source of all that quartz [and all the accessory minerals] is not necessarily the pluton. Indeed, probably very little is directly from it. This is an interesting example of how these things work; scale up hugely for subduction-sourced emplacement/volcanism!

Another translation; Much igneous activity - such as volcanoes along subduction zones, like say the US Cascades - are actually caused by very hot water rising up through the crust and melting rocks on the way. Yes, water can melt rock; if it's under enough pressure it can get far hotter than 100° and not turn to vapour.



And looking the other way;

Spot the fault

Meadfoot Slate on the left, Staddon Grit on the right.


A little further over, another fault;

 Dipping Staddon Grits on the left,

more massive Black Head Dolerite on the right,

fault shatter zone in between

 A closer look at either side;

Washed clean by the sea, 

the strata are more clearly visible

[if a bit stained] 

 The lower undulating reddish units

 are shallow-emplaced dolerite

with what might be pillow lavas above

[basaltic magma forcing its way into sea floor muds, saturated with water]

 Zooming out;
 

Spot the faults.

Brandy Cove and why it's there

Meadfoot slates \ Staddon grits \ Black Head dolerite

These rocks are all of a similar age - Devonian - but that's 'similar' in geological time; millions of years involved. Older to the left, and also deposited in [or under] shallower water. A bit counter-intuitive, as the sea in question [the Tethys ocean] was closing, but here the water was getting deeper due to local subsidence [the geological version; much slower but just keeps going, sometimes for kilometres..].



Looking offshore, there's a lovely example of tectonism in [relative] miniature;

The Ore Stone

A miniature view of what happens when plates collide

[subducted to left, obducted to right, accretionary wedge in the middle]

The thrust fault is at ~45°

[yes, that spot is a gap right through the island..]

Closer up, smaller scale structures.

Strata have been folded, compressed, stretched, and even separated

Though it perhaps should be mentioned that the collision which caused this folding was actually the other way around - the plate to the south [as is now] subducting under the continent to the north - the rocks are this way around as they are on the ascending arm of a bigger fold; folds go from 'mountain range' down to 'mountain' to 'hill' to 'slope' to 'small island' to 'ripple in stone' to even 'microscopic pattern on crystal'.
The example still holds up, though, as if you look at the last picture, you can see the smaller strata being folded and thrusted both ways. 'As above, so below' and all that.


To demonstrate further, turn 180° and see another and somewhat smaller fault, closer to;

A teeny thrust

And even smaller and even closer;

These lines are slickensides,

scratches caused by movement along a fault plane

There are a lot of slickensides visible at the Nose; mostly where quartz has been deposited along a fault plane [which has happened frequently, as they're an easy route for hot water to move along], which then moved again, scratching the sheets of hard-wearing and easy to see mineral.



Wandering away from tectonism and structural geology and into the near past [geologically speaking], the Nose is also the site of a very nice raised beach; including wave-cut platform, which is handily right next to a current wave-cut platform.

Ta and indeed da;

Modern platform fore and to left

Raised platform eroded to vertical cliff

Overlying palaeobeach material sloping and vegetated

Let's look a little closer;

Grey limestone strata 

overlain by beach material

[which is chunks of the same stuff, unsurprisingly]

Beach material

[though 'fallen scree' might be closer to reality, 

it being the last material eroded as the sea receded]

So, we've seen some plants and animals - a few even alive - and lots of bent and broken rocks.

Some of you may be still awake, and if so then well done. I hope you maybe even feel a little more knowledgeable about how deranged this guy is some sticky out bit of Devon the wonders of the world around us. Because everywhere is like this. Not the exactly the same, but everywhere has a story [[oh I can't believe I just typed that]] that is its own. There are rocks under all our feet [sometimes with quite a bit of stuff in the way, its true] and life gets about as well.




Be Seeing You..



[[*I'm not going into the JC except to point out that if anyone with half a second's geology had been involved, they'd have started at the base of the section.]]