Another day in the shallow Jurassic seas of southwestern Utah

St. George, Utah — Back to the Gunlock region for me to revisit old Carmel Formation research sites to check for access issues and new exposures. This trip has also given me a chance to update my images of the unit. Most of my previous images are shockingly on film. I’ve been in this business a long time.

Above is one of my favorite Carmel outcrops, the cliff at Eagle Mountain. The white and buff layers are the Co-op Creek Limestone Member of the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic). They are topped by a thick, well-cemented conglomeratic sandstone, The Iron Springs Formation (Upper Cretaceous). This is a nice example of an erosional disconformity between the units with an interval of time unrecorded (a hiatus). The cliff is on private land, so I’m in the process of finding the owners. The image was taken looking northeast from: 37°18.428’N, 113°44.408’W.

Today I looked at some smaller details in the Carmel sections. I found these exquisite mudcracks near the Eagle Mountain locality. This is solid rock, even though the cracks look modern. This shows, of course, that this patch of muddy seafloor dried out, producing the cracks by desiccation of clay minerals.

On top of the mudcracked layer is a thin carbonate bed with vugs and cracks filled with gypsum. This represents a hypersaline environment where gypsum and/or anhydrite was precipitated as evaporite minerals. We thus went in time from a dry seabed to one covered by shallow briny water.

Within the gypsum-rich layers are intraclasts of carbonate mud derived from the mudcracked layer below. When the seawater returned it had enough energy at times to rip up pieces of the hardened mud below.

Finally, on top of the gypsiferous layer is a limestone rich in star-shaped crinoid debris (ossicles of Isocrinus nicoletti). This represents the influx of normal marine water, albeit in a restricted context. As far as I can tell, there are multiple triplet layer sets like this near the middle of the Carmel in the Gunlock area. What was controlling these changes in sealevel and chemistry?

I would be neglecting my duties as a geologist if I didn’t mention that there is much more to the geology here than the Carmel Formation. Above we see the underlying Navajo Sandstone with its massive cross-bedded eolian dune features. The Navajo is topped here by thick basaltic lava flows of Pleistocene-Holocene age (the Santa Clara Volcanic Field).

Lovely place for a geologist!