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Albert Formation Transcript
Transcript
Dr. David Keighley, Department of Earth Sciences, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
So the drive from Hampton to Sussex along Highway One is roughly equivalent to driving from a floodplain with trees, out into the middle of a lake 360 million years ago. So here at this first outcrop we are on the equivalent to a … river floodplain with upright trees growing and occasionally getting flooded by little channel sandstones and sheetfloods.
So we have travelled a few kilometers east along Highway One, and that’s equivalent to travelling from the river floodplain to the lakeshore. And the evidence of the lakeshore is here, and the presence of wave ripples. Now this is a top surface. The rocks have all been tilted since they were first deposited on a lakeshore.
Sometimes the lakes…[traffic noise].. Sometimes the lakes had a sandy shore, which then had wave ripples on them. Other times the shoreline was very muddy and very quiet water, and that water occasionally dried out, and then the mud dried out, forming a lot of these desiccation cracks.
Okay, so here we are in the deeper part of the lake. The lake was probably … fairly steep sided, so we see up here that these muds, these dark grey muds have slid and slumped down the side of the lake. Now these muds are very dark, dark grey. Lots of organic matter in it, and further [west] east of here these rocks are found about two and a half kilometers below the surface, and that is a depth sufficient to heat up the organic matter in here and produce natural gas which is being extracted at the McCully gas field.
