The Daily Croissant

"The Milky Way appears over a bizarre geological formation (called Panaca formation) in Cathedral Gorge State Park, Nevada. This place was covered by a lake nearly a million years ago. The richly colored canyons are remnants of this ancient lakebed. Over centuries the lake began to gradually drain. Erosion on the exposed parts of sediment and gravel carved rivulets, splitting tiny cracks and fissures into larger and larger gullies and canyons."
Wally Pacholka, Astropics.com

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A few kilometers from the north-western German city of Dermold in the Lippe region of the country, there is a highly unusual rock formation. In an area otherwise devoid of large rocks, the soaring, slender columns of Externsteine stand out as they rise sharply and with no little majesty from the surrounding landscape. Little wonder that the site has been attracting curious visitors for thousands of years.

see also Externsteine - Walpurgisnacht, Sonnenwende, Halloween

"The image above is a land cover map of Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin developed by the neural network. Barren lands, scrublands, and forests appear in shades of beige and green. Potential fossil localities are pink, and likely fossil localities are red. Fossil localities often occur along steep slopes where erosion regularly uncovers new fossils."

October 17 is National Fossil Day, celebrating paleontologists, the ancient life forms they seek, and fossil-rich national parks. 

Photographer: Bret Webster 
Summary Authors: Bret Webster; Jim Foster

"The photo above shows a particularly long (approximately 9 ft or 3 m) serpent petroglyph found in the San Rafael Swell of east central Utah. Very little has changed at this spot since the petroglyphs here were first painted some 2,000 years ago. The serpent, rock face and Milky Way look now much as they did then. San Rafael Swell, a weathered dome-shaped anticline, was pushed up to the surface during the Paleocene epoch. The petroglyphs or pictograms can be traced back to people of the Desert Archaic Culture and perhaps to people of the Fremont culture, more recent arrivals, who inhabited this areas from about 1600 hundred years ago to 800 years ago."

The Storr is prime example of the Trotternish landslip, the longest such feature in Great Britain.

The area in front of the cliffs of the Storr is known as the Sanctuary. This has a number of weirdly shaped rock pinnacles, the remnants of ancient landslips. One of the most famous of these is known as the Old Man of Storr."

by Rick Scott 

"The photo above showing a huge outcrop of breccia was taken in Fall Canyon at Death Valley National Park, California. Breccia typically forms when angular fragments (over 2mm in diameter) of rock accumulate in streambeds and alluvial fans, for instance. The pieces become bound by mineral cement or are fixed by much smaller particles that fill the spaces between the angular pieces. A debris flow is one condition where binding of the fragments can happen. Another such condition is a meteor impact crater. Breccia is similar to conglomerate, but in conglomerate the fragments are more rounded, indicating that they've traveled further (are more eroded) before cementation occurs."

“Ringing Rocks” (20 miles east of Butte, Montana) is one of the most unusual rock formations in the country. A similar "ringing rock" formation exists in Pennsylvania. Folks from all over travel the three-mile gravel road north of I-90 just to pound on Montana's version of "Ringing Rocks" with hammers.

Nobody knows for sure exactly why the rocks ring like bells when struck with a hammer. The rocks do contain a significant amount of iron, which might be part of the explanation. However, the high iron content doesn’t explain two other strange qualities that the rocks possess . . . Not all of the rocks ring when struck, and they don’t ring when they are removed from the site, suggesting that the ringing has something to do with the way the rocks lay against one another. Larger flat ones seem to produce an especially impressive sound when struck.