loco viejo

By LV

View from a Silurian outlier

No idea how I got this abstract effect, but I rather like it, so here it is... was trying to take a pic of Black Country lights from outside WTE house, on a raised bit of land in Dudley - the hills of Dudley are made of older, harder Silurian limestone, famous for its many fossils, including Calymene blumenbachii, the trilobite better known as 'The Dudley Bug' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calymene_blumenbachii ...
Probably my most awe inspiring geological experience was near here as a 17 year old: travelled here by bus from home, dug around for a bit in a disused quarry unearthing fossils, but most amazingly, scratching away at one exposed bedding plane which had a couple of bumps poking up from it... which turned out to be the eyes of a seafloor-dwelling trilobite... so here's the (true) story: About 425 million years ago, Mr Trilobite is hiding in the mud with his eyes poking up, watching for unsuspecting prey... then a mudslide is triggered and buries poor Mr Trilobite alive... then for 100s of millions of years, 100s of metres depth of sediments are laid down on top of him... then Laurasia collided with Gondwanaland about 280 million years ago (forming Pangaea), forcing these long-buried rocks upwards... then over the next 280 million years, the overlying rocks were slowly eroded away until Mr Trilobite was not far below the surface... then in the 18th/19th century limestone quarrying dug out the remaining overlying rock, until Mr Trilobite's eyes were once more exposed at the surface of the earth, at which precise point, the quarries were abandoned... Then in 1988, Kevin Cooper makes a trip to the quarry, notices the little bulges, scrapes away the mudstone around, and reveals (after a miraculous 425 million year 'journey'), Mr Trilobite's body once more...
When looked at from that perspective, a rubbish day with no sales and a poor performance from Liverpool loses some of its significance... (:

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