My Third Field Trip Part 5

This is the 5th and also last part of my whole photo shower. After sixteen days of field work it was finally time to come home again. Before we went back to Berlin, we made one last detour to Eisenach, Thuringia. The town's landmark is the Wartburg Castle which is an UNESCO World Heritage Site and world-famous because it's the place where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German.

However, we were not interested in the castle itself but in its parking lot because there is a nice outcrop showing an alternating sequence of conglomerates and silty mudstones which represents a combination of proximal and distal alluvial fan deposits.

That is the outcrop at the parking lot. It even is a geological natural monument because of the Wartburg conglomerate which is quite as famous as the Wartburg Castle among German geologists (others too?). The layers of the Wartburg conglomerate start close to the top of the outcrop. Below there are other conglomerates and mudstones of the Eisenach Formation.

This photo shows a very interesting gravel-filled sedimentary dike our professor recently made a publication about in the Zeitschrift der deutschen Gesellschaft für Geowissenschaften. There are at least 42 of those dikes around but before our professor dealt whith them nobody had never found out what they really are. Our professor assumes that they are artesian injections at the base of the alluvial fans. However, he also questions his hypothesis but still his observations and explanations are very plausible.

Looking back at the sixteen day, I have really learned a lot. It's not only about the geology itself but also about the work methods. I'm looking forward to my next field trips...

Now the report on my two field trips comes to an end. I'm already in delay because the new semester began more than one month ago and there is a lot to write about.