Ghostly Geology
Halloween is here! This is my favorite part of fall: costumes, spooky stuff, decorating in black not only allowed but encouraged…. This is the holiday I was born for.
And I have some geology made for the holiday! This year, the theme is ghosts, and we’re going to visit some very ghostly geology and paleontology indeed.
1. Ghost Shrimp Haunts Ichnologist
This is a different kind of ghost shrimp than the ones under discussion, but it is metal enough for Halloween, so we’re rolling with it. Credit:
Freddie Alequin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Paleontology isn’t just about bones and preserved bodies: a branch of it, ichnology*, also looks at the things those bodies left behind, like fossilized trails, tracks, nests, burrows, borings, excavations, and even the divots left by pee. In this post, my favorite ichnologist, Tony Martin, talks about a very unusual trace he found that would be even more exciting to find in the fossil record.
Life Traces of the Georgia Coast: Ghost Shrimp Whisperer
Geologists love ghost shrimp, too, because of how their burrows are so numerous, fossilize easily, and are sensitive shoreline indicators. I wrote about this before with regard to how geologists in the 1960s were able to map ancient barrier islands of the Georgia coastal plain by looking for trace fossils of these burrows. Since then, geologists and paleontologists have identified and applied these sorts of trace fossils worldwide, and in rocks from the Permian Period to the Pleistocene Epoch.
I could prattle on about ghost shrimp and their ichnological incredibleness for the rest of the year, but will spare you of that, gentle reader, and instead will get to the point of this post. Just when I thought I’d learned nearly everything I needed to know about ghost-shrimp ichnology, one shrimp decided I needed to have my eyes opened to some traces I had never seen them make before just a few months ago.
*Not to be confused with ichthyology, which has to do with fishies. It’ll help to remember that ikhnos means “track” or “trace” in Greek, while ikhthus means “fish.”
2. Ghosts of Minerals Past
Phantom quartz from Brazil. Credit: Didier Descouens (CC BY-SA 3.0)
What’s more ghostly than a mineral entombing another mineral inside? These phantom gems make for fantastical viewing, and tell us that conditions were ripe for crystal formation at least twice in the same location.
National Museums Scotland: Ilana Halperin: Can a mineral be haunted?
It’s not the usual place you’d expect to find a ghost, but National Museums Scotland actually has around twenty so-called Ghost Minerals. They’re one of the objects that artist Ilana Halperin has uncovered in the Museum’s stores and they’re more beautiful than spooky.
3. Ghosts of Villages Slain by Geology
Detail of Cretto di Gibellina, a memorial built on the remains of the village of Gibellina. Credit: hydRometra (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Sometimes when things are shaken apart, they can’t be put back together again. Throughout human history, more than one settlement has been abandoned because of geological mayhem. It’s happened more recently than you might think. These Italian villages perished just over half a century ago: their ending is a sad story, and their remains still haunt us. The ethereally beautiful monument of Cretto di Gibellina now outlines the vanished streets of Gibellina, one of the villages that died that day. You can read about the ill-fated rebuilding attempts and personal stories of the survivors here. A wonderful photographic and text exploration of the monument is here.
Earthquake Geology: Earthquake-related ghost villages in Sicily
As titled by the INGV blog, the Belice Valley earthquake (15/01/1968), in Western Sicily, Italy, was a natural and social disaster. Among many damaged villages and towns, this M~6 event left four of them completely razed to the ground: Poggioreale, Gibellina, Montevago, Salaparuta.
4. The Short Life of Rhyolite
The remains of the John S. Cook Bank Building in Rhyolite, Nevada. This was once one of the most fancy and expensive buildings in town, and still cuts an impressive figure. Credit: USGS
Slowly decaying back into the desert from which it rose, the boom town of Rhyolite, Nevada was born, lived, and died in less than two decades. We tend to think of the Gold Rush as ending in the 1800s, but people were still striking gold out west and towns were springing up practically overnight in the early 20th Century. Rhyolite, named for the volcanic rocks upon which the town was built, was born when gold was discovered in fractures in 8,000 foot thick rhyolitic lava flows. The population exploded from two to 1,200 in just two weeks. Alas for it, a long life was not in its future. Had it been a person, the fortune teller lady at the fair would have clicked her tongue sadly as she studied the woefully truncated lifeline in its palm.
National Park Service: Rhyolite Ghost Town
There were over 2000 claims covering everything in a 30 mile area from the Bullfrog district. The most promising was the Montgomery Shoshone mine, which prompted everyone to move to the Rhyolite townsite. The town immediately boomed with buildings springing up everywhere. One building was 3 stories tall and cost $90,000 to build. A stock exchange and Board of Trade were formed. The red light district drew women from as far away as San Francisco. There were hotels, stores, a school for 250 children, an ice plant, two electric plants, foundries and machine shops and even a miner’s union hospital.
The town citizens had an active social life including baseball games, dances, basket socials, whist parties, tennis, a symphony, Sunday school picnics, basketball games, Saturday night variety shows at the opera house, and pool tournaments. In 1906 Countess Morajeski opened the Alaska Glacier Ice Cream Parlor to the delight of the local citizenry. That same year an enterprising miner, Tom T. Kelly, built a Bottle House out of 50,000 beer and liquor bottles.
5. The Ghosts of Drowned Lunar Craters
A ghost crater within a ghost crater, with tiny new craters sprinkled on top! This is Lyot Crater, shot in 1968 from the Lunar Orbiter. Credit: NASA
If you look at the surface of a cratered body, sometimes you’ll see faint circular outlines: the ghosts of craters that once were. They tell us that there’s some active geologic process happening: erosion, or volcanism, or perhaps glaciation. These worlds may seem dead, but there’s at least an echo of life!
Luna Sights: Ghost craters on the Moon!
A ghost crater is a crater buried in lava, with only the crater rim visible. How do they form? Say a regular crater forms by an asteroid/meteor impact at some point. After that, during the time of active volcanism on the Moon, lava eruptions in the area may fill the crater to the brim, leaving behind just the rim. Many such ghost craters have been spotted on the Moon. My favorite is this one where the crater is fully submerged in lava, but the bright ejecta from the impact is still visible!
6. Ghost Rock Karstification
Alas, there are no CC or public domain images of ghost-rock karstification, but there is this very adorbs little ghost rock animal in Juwangsan National Park in Korea. Credit: garycycles3 (CC BY 2.0)
Karst landscapes are one of my all-time favorite things, and it turns out there’s ghosts there! If this snippet whets your appetite, you can find an engrossing paper on the process here, and more images of what it looks like here.
A ghost rock, is it some sort of apparition of a rock from the past? Well yes of sorts. Ghost rock karstification is a two stage erosional process that affects Limestones. The first stage is associated with the chemical weathering of limestone that leaves a ‘ghost-rock’ known as residual alterite. This can only form when there is a low hydro dynamic system allowing for non soluble composition of limestone to remain behind. The second stage is lead by mechanical weathering that erodes away the residual alterite leading to the traditional karstic morphology that is well recognised in limestone areas worldwide. This second stage is associated with a high energy hydrological environment
7. The Island that Wasn’t
Sandy Island noted on a nautical chart from 1908. Credit: R.C. Carrington
What’s more ghostly than an island that showed up on many maps over many decades, but couldn’t possibly exist? Sometimes, ocean islands are ephemeral entities; they’re often volcanoes rising briefly above the waves before erosion cuts them back down, or islands so close to sea level that wee shifts will either reveal or conceal them. This one, however, couldn’t have possibly been due to situations like that.
Structural Geology: Undiscovering a ghost island in the Pacific
Geographic exploration of our the lands of our planet is basically done and we can say confidently that there are not major unknown features out there. People still find waterfalls in the Amazon and the Himalayas -vertical features not easily detected with satellite data- , or relatively small rivers in the jungle -streams covered by jungle- but we have such a good coverage of the Earth by many sensors onboard satellites, that we can hardly imagine a team of explorers discovering a new river or an island.
What published yesterday the Guardian is actually quite the opposite: a team of marine scientist in the search of an island that, even though it was mapped in Google Earth as Sandy Island near New Caledonia it didn’t really exist. So they undiscovered it!
8. Haunting Sounds of a Ghost City
The Peacock, a yardang landform in Yardang National Geopark. Wind erosion continues to carve monuments, and makes ghostly noises to boot. Credit: 张骐[Zhang Qi] (CC BY-SA 3.0)
![张骐[Zhang Qi]](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunhuangyadan.jpg){kind=link}
China Highlights: Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark, Ghost Town
Yardang National Geopark is known in the locality as ‘Ghost City’, because when the wind blows through, there are sounds similar to ‘ghosts screaming’. There is an interesting legend.
There was once a magnificent castle, where the people worked hard and lived a comfortable life. With the accumulation of wealth, however, evil gradually took over people’s minds. They fought each other for money.
In order to improve the situation, a god came to the castle disguised as a ragged beggar. He told people that evil had changed him from a rich man to a beggar, thinking this would help them mend their ways, but his idea did not work. Instead, he was reviled and mocked.
As a result, he angrily turned the city into ruins, and all the people in the castle were buried under rubble. Every night, the spirits of the dead in the castle cry out, hoping the god will hear and respond to their confessions and pleas.
9. Rancho de los Brujos (Ranch of the Witches)
Rainbows over Ghost Ranch, NM. Oh, lord, that stormlight. I used to go out into the desert just after storms, staring transfixed at that fantastic golden light. Nothing on Earth is quite like it: the light seems like it’s a living entity. Credit: Larry Lamsa (CC BY 2.0)
Ghost Ranch in New Mexico has a rich human history and an even richer geological history. Georgia O’Keefe painted these magnificent rock formations in ethereal and haunting color. I spent my youth running the red rocks of closely related formations, and I can tell you there’s an unreal quality to these landscapes. You can believe that any number of supernatural beasts may roam the canyons. You can feel goosebumps rise for no reason as the wind howls over the crags. The ghosts of sand dunes and sea creatures are captured in these layers. It’s utterly magnificent.
Earth Magazine: Travels in Geology: Unearthing the ghosts of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico
Driving north from Santa Fe on Highway 84 is like driving through a museum’s worth of Georgia O’Keefe paintings. O’Keefe spent 50 years living at Ghost Ranch and in nearby Abiquiu, immortalizing the surrounding landscapes in paintings such as “The Black Place” and “The White Place.”
Such straightforward titles fit the clearly defined layers of black, white, gray, red, yellow and pink rocks lining the Chama River Valley, which runs along the far eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau; the layers here are as distinctly drawn as diagrams in a textbook.
Visiting Ghost Ranch is far better than paging through a textbook, of course, because you can actually hike through the Mesozoic layer cake and witness firsthand the rocks and fossils left behind from the Age of Dinosaurs. The towering layers of rock span a period of 130 million years and preserve evidence of a constantly evolving landscape of river systems, vast deserts, saline lakes, broad mudflats and ocean shorelines.
10. Fossils Replay a Dramatic Pleistocene Tableau
Detail of mammoth tracks, barely visible, grace a flat at White Sands National Monument. The human who left the hat for scale also left modern tracks in the sand. Credit: NPS/David Bustos
Ghostly fossil trackways allow us to become both hunter and hunted, reliving a scene from a long-vanished landscape. It’s incredible that such ephemeral things as tracks can be captured in mud, turned to stone, and revealed to future humans thousands or millions of years after they were made. Is there anything more haunting than to walk in the literal footsteps of living beings who have been dead for a geological age?
NPS: Ghost Fossils at Park Reveal Life and Death Story from the Ice Age
At seven- to eight feet tall, tightly muscled and swinging fore legs tipped with wolverine-like claws, the sloth would tear apart any hunter on direct approach. But in addition to tracks of humans following the sloth, there are more human tracks a safe distance away telling scientists that this was a community action making use of distraction and misdirection to gain the upper hand in deadly close-quarter combat.
Bennett believes the tracks show the sloth was turning and swinging at the stalker. “We also see human tracks on tip toes approach these circles; was this someone approaching with stealth to deliver a killer blow while the sloth was being distracted? We believe so. It was also a family affair as we see lots of evidence of children’s tracks and assembled crowds along the edge of the flat playa. Piecing the puzzle we can see how sloth were kept on the flat playa by a horde of people and distracted by a hunter stalking the sloth from behind, while another crept forward and tried to strike the killing blow as the animal turned.”
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