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Dating Rocks In Great Falls

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Great Falls; the pride of Northern Virginia, an awe-inspiring work of nature, has essentially been the non-stop work of geological events that occurred over many million years ago. The Great Falls is located along the boundaries of the Piedmont and the coastal plain of the Atlantic Ocean. A coastal plain is a flat land that sits next to the ocean. Also, the Potomac River that flows through the Falls has been a key factor in the creation of the gorge and the falls as we see them today.
Dating rocks through the radioactive elements can tell a lot about the geologic past about the earth, while some rocks have radioactive isotopes, others, unfortunately, don’t. The oldest rock in Great Falls is Meta Greywacke, which is a metamorphic rock and is about 550 million years old. Around 550 to 600 million years ago, continuous deposition of sediments through turbidites, eventually metamorphosed into Greywacke and Mica Schists. Once Granite intruded into the rocks around 470 million years ago, …show more content…
Faulting of the rocks is coincidental to the oldest sediments of the coastal plain which means that was the time when the Atlantic Ocean started opening up, thus the works of the Wilson cycle kicks in, which is basically the opening and closing of the ocean basins. The Wilson cycle shows us how through the opening and closing of the oceans is how the continents come back and forth, and analysis of rocks strike and dip proves exactly just that. During the field trip, we stopped to analyze a huge rock: Mica Schist and Meta Greywacke, which is a type of bedrock. After acute analysis of the rocks strike and dip; it was safe to conclude that many million years ago something massive like the African continent from the east, clashed against the North American continent, which physically made the rock face

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