Dr. Faust Fossil Collection

„When I consider the efforts I maked in this subject, no mountain was to high, no well to deep, no gallery to narrow and no cavern to puzzling.“

The german author, poet, politician and artist Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was also strongly interested in natural sciences, and so with geological and paleontological questions. One of his extensively studied subjects laid just for his front door, or better: under it, and also under his house and part of the city he was living since 1775, Weimar, a beautiful city located in the german Bundesland of Thuringia. Here the travertine found in the underground was used extensively as building stone and for industrial use, and was exploited since the 12th century.

Goethe was an enthusiastic collector of mineralogical, paleontological and geological, curiosities and between 1780 until 1832 he collected, exchanged and buyed at last 18.000 pieces of rocks, minerals and fossils.
Fossils comprise 718 examples, most notable are samples of the quaternary travertine of Weimar and surrounding area, with over 100 single specimens showing a large variety of plant and animal fossils. Animal fossils comprise fragments of tusks and molars of the interglacial woodland elephant Palaeloxodon antiquus, pieces of the jawbone and teeth’s of the woolly rhinoceros Dicerorhinus kirchbergensis, bones and teeth’s of the ice age bison Bison priscus mediator, also from horse (Equus taubachensis), brown bear (Ursus arctos) and antler fragments of deer (Cervus elaphus). An exceptionally fossil discovery is a petrified egg from a crane (Grus grus).

The determination and description of the fossil plants were achieved by Kaspar Graf von Sternberg (1761-1838), founder of modern paleobotany and a good friend of Goethe.

Goethe dealt with the idea to publish his observations of some of the discoveries. On 8. January 1819 he wrote to the editor and geologist Carl Caesar von Leonhard (1779-1862):
„We discovered in the vicinity of Weimar exquisite fossil bones: a half jawbone with teeth’s, similar to the Paläotherium, with remains of elephants, deer, horse and other animals that can found together.“ Unfortunately this paper never was written.

Stephanorhinus (Dicerorhinus) kirchbergensis

Equus taubachensis

Cervus elaphus

In 1821 the amateur geologist Christien Kieferstein (1784-1866) contacted him asking about in formations about the outcrops of this lithology. But at this moment Goethe was not able or willing to give further notices to him. Only two years later, after contacting the son of Goethe, August Goethe, Kieferstein received a stratigraphic description and some samples of the travertine. The young man visited during the 8. and 11. August 1823 the “tuffaceous caves out of the city limits”, collected samples and described exactly the found layers and corresponding lithology – sending the notes the very same day to Kieferstein. Goethe returned to Weimar in September, and now together with his son returned to the quarry and corrected the previously drawn stratigraphic column.
August intended to publish these observations; unfortunately his early death in 1830 prevented this intention.

"Stratigraphic column of a quarry, circa 10 min south of Weimar and just right of lake Chau after Belvedere", redrawn after Goethe 1823 (from STEINER 1996):


Symbology
1. Numbering of layers
2. plant imprints (mostly stems)
3. molluscs and mammal remains in travertine
4. compact travertine layers
5. brittle travertine layers
6. Chara and bryophyte travertines
7. mammal remains
8. molluscs
9. plant stems
10. silt
11. sand
12. solifluction horizont with pebbles
13. recent soil

The generalized stratygraphy after modern considerations:

The basis of the Succession is composed of a cemented conglomerate with crystalline and carbonatic pebbles ranging between centimetres to decimetres in diameter. This coarse river deposit is overlain by brownish to yellowish stratified silt and sand layers, interpreted as alluvial depositions. Then follows the “lower travertine“, an alternation of compact yellow with brittle travertine, also the lower part of the Eemian Ehringsdorf-Formation.
The lower travertine is separated from the upper by the so called “Pariser”, the name derives from the description by the botanist Dr. Herbst in 1860 as “Poröser Kalktuff”, meaning simply “porous calc tuff”. In the quarry it is recognizable as brown, loamy stratum that contains rare bones and teeth from small vertebrates. The “upper travertine” is similar to the lower, but differs in a gently greyish color and the presence of various pedogenetic horizons’ (“Pseudopariser”).

But still four handwritten exemplars are conserved today at the Goethe and Schiller archive in Weimar, they were used in the 20th century for the stratigraphic correlation between modern drill campaigns and old, today lost, quarry outcrops.

Bone fragment in the travertine of Ehringsdorf, a small village with the last active quarrys in the surroundings of Weimar.

Fauna of the interglacial travertine (180.000 to 200.000 years old).

References:

STEINER, W. (1996): Die Parkhöhle von Weimar. Abwasserstollen, Luftschutzkeller, Untertagemuseum. Stiftung Weimarer Klassik.

Trafoi glacier (1867)

Landscape at Trafoi in 1867, by the austrian artist Anton Schiffer (1811 - 1876).

Sometimes a tooth can come in quite handy!!!

Coming next:

(Click on the picture to enlarge)

AW: Let's Do A Time Warp!

Let's Do A Time Warp! – but what we need for it? 1,21 Gigawatts? A Warp 9 suitable space ship and a medium class star? A rift in the space-time continuum as we know it? A time machine?

Or simply an Accretionary Wedge Outside the Interzone?

Unfortunately we still not possess time travel technology, but nevertheless this doesn’t mean we are not capable to go in touch with the past. We not possess the technology to go from the present to the past, but we do possess the ability to bring the past to the present.
And considering time – and if you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about it - it's him, I’m not so fascinated by a particular point in time, but more on the passing of time.

Earth sciences deal with a fundamental problem; the study object itself is continuously destroying its own history, by rock alteration and erosion. The knowledge of rocks – and all related topics, ranging from fossil content to metamorphic events – therefore becomes more fragmented with increasing age. One might approach this historical perspective also from the opposite side: the younger the rocks, the more of them are still present. This makes the Quaternary by far the most intensively studied period – but nevertheless not necessarily the best understand – in fact, the good preservation of different facies in a restricted area or stratigraphic column, for example in the glacier forefield, is sometimes confusing simply by data excess.

So geologist and palaeontologists have to deal with rocks to reconstruct past environments and their change trough time. But not always rocks are well exposed or accessible; the bedrock is usually covered by younger soil material and/or vegetation. Even quaternary or recent sediments –often hidden only some meters under the landscape– are not always easy to reach. But like the old saying, if the mountain doesn’t came to Moses, Moses has to go to the mountain.

One possibility to recover sediments from the underground is by drilling them. If minor depths have to be reached, hand boring is a cheap and effective method. This method use is only limited by the penetration power – number of peoples pushing the borer in the underground, and by the increasing length and so weight of the rod system that can be handled and recovered. The method can largely used, for example to sample bogs, swamps and lakes in different terrain, from coastal swamps to small mountain bogs or lakes.



The recovered sediment samples can contain a lot of information’s:

-grain size distribution can give hinds for past erosion phases, large mineral grains or pebbles normally represent strong import of eroded material
- the colour of sediments give first information’s of deposition conditions, for example black sediments can show anaerobic deposition conditions
- the found minerals and chemical composition can give clues on catchment area, or chemical processes in the deposition environment
- pollen and spores can give hinds to reconstruct vegetation successions and changes trough time, and also climatic changes
- animal parts, like from arthropods, insects, microbes and even vertebrates also give precious information’s to reconstruct the past environment



So let’s see a typical sedimentation succession of some meters thickness in a former glaciated area of mid latitude, recovered by hand boring in a bog.


The basin of the former lake is commonly formed of bedrock or impermeable morain deposits of the last glacial maximum. Over them follows grey clays or silt, with no or only weak stratification, and no apparent fossil content. This sediments change gradually in white marls whit small gasteropods and bivalves, only a grey band is outstanding. Then there is a more or less distinct change in brown, plant detritus rich peaty material, with rare parts of insects.

Based on study on the fossil content, the sedimentology and deposition environment, and comparing the results with modern lakes and bogs and their fauna and flora, an attempt to imagine the story that this boring core can tell us can be undertaken.

10.000 to 18.000 years ago the great glaciers retreaded for the last time, uncovering a barren landscape, lacking vegetation cover. The basins carved by the glaciers where filled by time with water and mud, transported by rivers still feeded by small glaciers. This mud will form the grey clays. Still more time passes, the climate is warmer, the last ice melted, and the basin now is a lake surrounded by dense forests. One day of 11.000 years ago suddenly a black cloud covers the sky, and a fine, grey dust falls on the lake, where it sinks to the ground and deposits. Some hundred km distant from the lake the Laacher See Volcano erupted, covering half Europe with a small band of distinctive, grey ash.



But this event doesn’t disturb the community of animals living in the swallow, warm lake, and the carbonat rich catchment provides a high aviability for dissolved calcium in the water, an ideal habitat for a rich variety of mollusc.
More and more biogen marls deposit, filling slowly over millenia, but inexorably the basin. Plants grow in the swallow part of the lake, first mosses and aquatic plants, accumulating organic detritus and peaty material. In the middle of the forest a treeless plane extends - a bog has taken the place of the lake.


Finally, in the last centimetres’ of peaty deposits, pollen grains of cereals and other cultivated plants suggest first human settlements in the region. And only in the last millimetres’ our civilization and earth sciences develops methods to study the hidden archives of bog sediments – but also to destroy them. Lakes, swamps and bogs are one of the most threatened ecosystems in industrialized countries, threatened by urbanization and agricultural use.

All this happened in the last 10.000 years, in a single point – now consider the age and the vastity and diversity of earth itself. Realizing the age and changes in environment, flora and fauna that occurred, we obviously have to reconsider our relationship to earth and other species and also our place in earth history.

This maybe is the most important message that drilling trough time can give us.


REFERENCES:

VAN LOON, A.J. (2000): The strangest 0.05% of the geological history. Earth-Science Reviews 50: 125-133

What lake sediments are good for

47,8 million years ago, deep inside the paneuropean tropical forest, the common noises of this rich ecosystem were overlaid by a terrifing bang. A hughe explosion, and subsequentely a large cloud raised up to the sky, bringing death and distruction to the inhabitants of this world, and leaving a large hole in the landscape.

For at least a million years unlucky animals felt in the lake that filled the crater, even a road-killed oppossum, that conserved by the particular geological setting, million years after will be worshipped by a bunch of primates. The discovery of D. masillae has (re)brougth (in positive but also negative sense) to the public the fossil lagerstätte of Messel, a heritage not only notable for his paleontological, but also geological value.


Lakes rappresents basins that can record and preserve biological and sedimentological changes happening in terrestrial environments.
Exceptionally good sedimentation “traps” are maar-lakes – lakes created by a phreatomagmatic eruption and subsequentely filled by precipitation or runoff. Maar-lakes are surrounded by a wall of volcanic material – ash and tuff- deposited during their formation. The slopes so tends to fall in direction of the center, restricting the catchement on the near, the lake surrounding area. This has important effects on the possible inwash in the lake – fossils found in the lake sediments rappresent a very restricted and local fauna and flora taphonomic assocation.
This maybe also explain the low biodiversity of found fish and plants fossils in the Messel Maar - the steep cliffs were lacking vegetation, and fish couldn´t colonise the lake easy because of the missing connections to other rivers and lakes.
Maar lakes normally – apart of their circular form- possess steep walls and cliffs, that suddenly fall from the shore to the bottom of the lake. Because of their depth, they show a strong temperature gradient between superficial and bottom water layers, and so different water densitys, preventing deep reaching currents and so most time a mixing of the different layers. The bottom water is also impoverished by oxygen, creating a zone where colonisation by higher animals is practically impossible, the so called Monimolimnion. In this setting, sediments can deposit undisturbed and carcasses that reach the bottom are not disarticulated by scavengers.

This stratification of the water column can be disturbed in temperate zones by low temperatures during spring and autumn (in winter the surface is frozen), the cooled superficial water can reache the same density of the cold bottom water, enabling a mixing of the water bodies. In contrast, in tropic zones - or like Messel , were temperature variations during the year are much lesser, the Monimolimnion can – if not disturbed by geological or exceptionally climatic events- be preserved for long periods, and so the sedimentation is more stable and preservation af animals more efficient.

The well known modern european maar lakes of the Eifel and the Auvergne are examples of dimictic (2x mixing per year) lakes of the temperate zone, the fossil maar lakes of Messel and surrounding areas are thought to resemble monomictic (1 or lesser mixing per year) lakes of today tropic zones.
The first recorded the biotic, sedimentological and climatic changes of the last million to 100.000 years, the second recorded parts of an ecosystem of the Eocene, 47 million years ago.

Even if the settings of this examples are different, they show some similarities, primary in geological structure, and so studying “recent” shapes maybe can give clues to interpret fossil forms and vice versa. A typical sediment of a maar succession was observed by the Messel drilling project in 2001. In addition of the “oil-shales” – the fossil bearing bituminous pelites- and/or lacustrine sediments of the upper and lower Messel-formation (0-240m), volcaniclastic sequences (240-373m) as well as rocks of the diatreme breccia (373-433m) breccia produced by rising and exploding magma that breaks the circumstanding rocks) were discovered. The bottom of the lacustrine sediments rappresent coarser erosion material from the vegetation-lacking walls, followed by detritus-and organic material rich mud (mostly including fossil remnants of monocellular algae), deposited in a 300 up to 600m in diameter lake surrounded by a dense forest. With the infilling of the Messel-lake, and surrounding other lakes - that today rappresents the Messel-formation, probably a bog developed, and finally “dry” land covered by forest.
By the way, even if bogs are also a good archive, especially for pollen and spores, the found plant fossils rappresents a restricted flora, including plants adapted for bog conditions (for example low nutrient content), and are so much lesser suitable for paleoenvironments reconstructions.

Lakes are in geological perspectives short-living features, for Messel a sedimentation period of only one million years is presumed. Neverthenless their rappresent not only an important paleontological, but also a geological archive, in distant past but also in/for the last 1000 years.

Schematic geological profile of the Messel-Maar:

Brigth brown: Tephra-layers and volcaniclastic material (tephra - wall)
Black: Bituminous pelites, stratified with sandy layers (Messel Formation)
Green: Conglomerates, sandstones and coarse sediments with volcaniclastic material
Dark green: Permian Sediments (Moret Formation)
Pink: Carboniferous sediments, cristalline rocks, granits and amphibolites
(after GRUBER & MICKLICH 2007)

REFERENCES:

GRUBER, G. & MICKLICH, N. (2007): Messel – Schätze der Urzeit. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt & WBG
NITZSCHE, T.; ROLF, C. & deWALL, H. (2006): Origin of magnetic anomalies in volcaniclastic units of the Messel maar-diatreme (Germany). Z. Dt. Ges. Geowiss. 157/3: 373-385

A typical landscape in the Alps...

A typical landscape in the Alps...

Springtime = landslide time

The abundant snow falls in the winter 2008-2009 in the Alps are now melting since March 2009, and until now have provided hughe amounts of melt water. This water not all run off, but also provide restocking of the groundwater reservoir, in fact the groundwater levels now are the highest measured in the last years.

But water can also trigger failure of rock or earth masses by reducing the friction between layers or other discontinuities, that can then become the surface of rupture for a landslide.

This is an example that occured two weeks ago, destroying a bridge between a village and some smaller farms.

In this case, a small creek provided melt water, that infiltrated in a older earthflow (creep), consisting of reworked argilleous material and debris, resting on an alternation of marls and sandstones. Also the creek eroded the orographic right flank of the relict earthflood.
On the orographic left flank, the scarp of the recent landslide, representing the surface of rupture, follows the general dip of the strata (dipping southeast).

Notable are also older scarps, with abundant vegetation, that rappresent older movements and failures of the landslide.

The landslide generated also a debris flow, that following the creek deposited the landslide material in a delta at the end of the gorge of the creek, and subsequently damming up a larger river feed by the smaller creek.