Salona
Welcome to the virtual field trip to the Salona Formation.
This field trip allows students to explore the transition from marine carbonates to siliciclastic rocks deposited during the Upper Ordovician period. Students are asked to make observations regarding grain size and bedding thickness and will create a stratigraphic section of part of the outcrop. Additionally, this outcrop contains multiple bentonite layers deposited during large volume, explosive eruptions. These bentonites help document the tectonic setting of the region and allow for numerical dating of the stratigraphic units.
The goals of this field trip are:
1) to describe the lithologies that make up the Salona Formation;
2) to study their arrangement stratigraphically; and
3) to look for (and to describe/document) clues that relate to the depositional environment.
Be sure to get your eyes “tuned” to see the fossils in these rocks. One thing to consider here is what the vertical succession of lithologies might mean: What might have caused the changes you observe? Are there cycles of lithologies that repeat over time? Are there noticeable changes after (above) the biggest ash layer? How does the orientation of the stratigraphy relate to the tectonic setting?
The virtual field trip is available here:
