Jan 2, 2025
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This morning, joined a beach cleanup at Hioki Site hosted by the geopark. 今朝は日沖サイトにて、ジオパーク主催の海岸清掃に参加。
This site is a rather popular fishing spot. So, in addition to the litter drifted ashore, we always find garbage left by anglers. :( That really upsets me. このサイトはポピュラーな釣りスポットなので、漂着ゴミ以外のゴミもいつもある場所。同じ釣り人の一人として、ホンマに憤慨すること多し。(-"-;)
This site is a wonderful place for geology lovers to observe pillow lava and pyroclastic breccia while picking up litter. ;) ここは海底で噴出したマグマの営みを見られるサイトなので、ゴミ拾いながら枕状溶岩やら火山角礫岩（だったっけ？）を愛でることができるというお得な場所。💕 At the same time, it’s a site where you can find some rare wild plants in abundance. 同時に、他の場所であまり見られない植物がたくさん自生してる場所でもあり。
確かこれオオハマグルマだったと思う。室戸ではここ以外であまり見かけないらしい。
ルリハコベは、室戸岬先端の遊歩道沿いでちらほら見かけたら、植物好きの観光客は躍り上がって喜ぶんだけど。ココに来たら実はイヤというほど生い茂ってる。ｗｗ
And after the cleanup, I found something really useful. This geosite is on the seashore and thus prone to tsunami. But since it is not a residential area, there is no high seawalls along the national road and no evacuation route leading up from the national road to a higher place. The anglers, walking pilgrims and geopark visitors who come here would be helpless when the predicted major earthquake hits. So I’ve been wanting to find the old mountain trail that only a few aged locals know where it was. Today, one of the cleanup participants asked around and finally found where the old trail was and took me there. It looked like an animal trail covered with weeds and giant reeds, but at least it was a trail. So... maybe I can talk to someone in the Disaster Prevention Division of this city to make a good use of the trail...? そして海岸清掃が終わった後、ナイスな発見が。 この日沖サイトはもろに海岸で、津波被害を受ける場所。だけど人家がないエリアなので、国道沿いに高い堤防もなければ、国道から高台へ上がる避難路もない。でも釣り人は常時いるし歩き遍路さんも通るし、枕状溶岩を見に来るジオパークビジターも来る。この人たちは南海トラフ巨大地震が来た時には、本当に助けがないことになると、ずっと気にしてたんです私。で、地元の年寄りだけが場所を知ってるという、はるか昔に使われてた山に上がる小道を、見つけたかったんです。 今日の海岸清掃の際に、私の知り合いが聞いて回ってその小道の場所を聞き出し、私と一緒に探してくれました。ありました！！今やダンチクに埋もれた獣道状態でしたが。でもいちおう、昔にちゃんと作ったらしき小道。 これ、市の防災課の人とかに話して、ちゃんとした避難路に整備しないか相談してみようかな...。
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Moss-covered outcrop of Miocene basaltic pillow lava near the Japan Sea coast where the active rifting happened 16 million years ago. The rocks tilted to the left so the upper left is the section top. A good example of the rounded fan-shape of a pillow section just right to the pole handle. The walking pole 1 m long.
Pillow lavas
Every so often on the planet Earth, the weirdness of plate tectonics winds up creating a situation where part of the ocean floor is actually thrust up onto the continent. Often it’s thought this happens in settings related to subduction, where a tiny bit of ocean crust is formed as a continent is pulled apart, but then that new ocean crust is thrust back onto the continent when the basin closes.
This setup is thought to be the origin of the Oman Ophiolite, also known as the Samail Ophiolite, one of (if not the) best exposed ophiolites on Earth. In Oman, much of the stratigraphy of the ocean crust is preserved and available at the Earth’s surface. An enterprising geologist in the desert can literally walk across units that once ran from the ocean floor to the upper mantle.
In this shot, a geologist is standing by pillow basalts. Much of the world’s ocean crust is formed by eruptions at mid-ocean ridges. When lava comes up at a mid-ocean ridge, it interacts with the water at the edge and freezes, but it keeps expanding and flowing outwards, breaking apart the crust and forming what are effectively lava blobs that we call pillows, because they have a pillow-like shape. In this shot, you can see pillows exposed in cross-section; they have rims near their edges where the lava cooled more rapidly thanks to the surrounding seawater, and cores that look a little different because they cooled a little more slowly. Every blob-shaped area of rock in this image is a pillow lava.
This pile of pillow basalts, tens of meters high, is a tiny slice of what the Earth’s igneous ocean crust looks like. Person for scale.
-JBB
Image credit: Anita Di Chiara (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu) https://imaggeo.egu.eu/view/13270/
Pillow lava erupting underwater on the Juan de Fuca ridge, combined with a shot of pillow lava exposed at the surface in the Oman Ophiolite.
Walk across Pillow Lava, Sicily. Each of these bulbs erupted below the ocean surface and have since been uplifted above the waves.
The Ark Encounter in Kentucky is a Shocking Rebuke to Evolutionists!
The Ark Encounter in Kentucky is a Shocking Rebuke to Evolutionists!
By Don Boys, Ph.D.
The “ark encounter” in Northern Kentucky is just that—an encounter. It is almost breath-taking in size and engineering. It is seven stories high and a football field-and-a-half long making it the largest wood frame structure in the world. It tells the biblical and historical story of a global flood in the days of Noah.
The stunning, world-class exhibits provide detailed…
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Oregon Coast Range Pillow Basalts
The Coast Range in Oregon lies to the west of the more well-known Cascade Range, creating the other side of the Willamette Valley and providing spectacular views of the Cascades and the seashore on a clear day. However, unlike the Cascades, which are composed of andesites and rhyolites (silica-rich, viscous rocks characteristic of continental volcanic arcs), the Coast Range is composed of basalts and sandstones. How did these oceanic rocks end up forming mountains up to 1249 m (4097 ft) high?
The northwest coast of North America is defined by the subduction of smaller plates, including the Juan de Fuca, Explorer, and Gorda plates, beneath the behemoth North American continent. 400 km west of the Coast Range lies the divergent plate boundary between the Juan de Fuca plate and the Pacific plate, and 150 km offshore lies the Cascadia megathrust subduction zone, in which the Juan de Fuca plate sinks back down into the asthenosphere (the uppermost part of the mantle, typically found at 100 km deep).
However, not all rocks are doomed to melt. The oldest rocks in the Coast Range, the Siletz River volcanics, formed during the Paleocene and middle Eocene (60-45 million years ago). These Siletz River volcanics provide clear examples of pillow basalts, indicating that these rocks were formed underwater. Note the radial jointing in the second picture -- the inside of these round bubbles looks like a bomb blast because of even, outside-in cooling.
Mary’s Peak, the highest summit of the Coast Range, is actually an old hot spot volcano, formed from a weak point in the ocean floor similar to modern Hawaii. The island chains towered above the sea floor, moving east in a conveyor-belt like system. Over time, these rocks were slammed into the continent at a rate of 4 cm/year, and instead of subducting, accreted onto the side of the North American plate. With more accretion, these sea mounts were uplifted and are now the Coast Mountain Range. These oceanic basalts define the west coast of Oregon, as the Columbia River basalts define the east and the Cascade range defines the center.
AGB
Photo Credit: 1 - Loren Kerns - https://flic.kr/p/ebwoJD 2 - Amanda Barker - https://flic.kr/p/EH9vMf References: Bishop, Ellen Morris, "In Search of Ancient Oregon", 2003 http://www.oregongeology.org/sub/publications/ims/ims-028/unit07.htm