Friday Field Foto #24: Conglomerate injectites

I don't have a lot of time right now...still traveling...but wanted to get this Friday Field Foto posted while I wait for my flight (hopefully a better experience than the trip here). I'm not traveling at all for the next 5 weeks, so I should be blogging more frequently (and finishing my dissertation).

A paper I'm a co-author on just came out, which I will post about in more detail next week. The photo above (that's me for scale) is a great view of some conglomerate injectites in Cretaceous sedimentary rocks down in Patagonia. I showed a photo of some smaller injectites previously on this blog.

Note the flat lying shale and thin-bedded sandstone that I am standing on juxstaposed against a more resistant conglomeratic body that is nearly vertical.

That must be a fault, right? Wrong. I know this may sound crazy, but this feature represents the upward injection of coarse-grained material through the overlying deposits. Yeah....right. Give me a few days and I'll put together a better explanation of all this. It's pretty wild stuff.