That’s fairly steep I gotta admit, I looked at this photo and…

That’s fairly steep

I gotta admit, I looked at this photo and kinda wished I was here with a Brunton compass. This would be so fun to measure!

See the very steep face of rock running though the center of this image? These are sedimentary rocks in the Austrian Alps, formed during the Permian about 275 million years ago or so. With some notable exceptions, geologists assume that when sedimentary rocks form, they form in layers that are horizontal. Sheets of sediments spread out over the landscape, creating flat layers we call bedding. Once sediments are lithified into rocks, these bedding planes serve as spots of weakness where rocks can fracture and erode.

This bedding has been so twisted by the formation of the Alps that in this site, the bedding is nearly vertical and erosion or fracturing along bedding planes has created the steep, flat face of this slope. The originally flat lying layers have been tilted by something like 75 to 90 degrees. Geoscientists surviving the hike up to this face would likely pull out a compass and measure the angle that these rocks slope off to the side at – the angle that rocks dip at tells us a lot about how they were folded and faulted to get to this orientation.

-JBB

Image credit: https://flic.kr/p/fpp76C