KURESSAARE, SAAREMAA, ESTONIA–The Wooster Geologists Estonia Team today braved the Baltic Sea again and took a ferry from the island of Hiiumaa to return to their previous field sites on the island of Saaremaa. We worked at Soeginina Cliff on the western coast (shown above) to finish up Nick Fedorchuk’s Independent Study field research on the Wenlock-Ludlow (Silurian) erosional sequence. It was a fun day because we now have hypotheses to test about these rocks and fossils. More on those later.
The above rock shows an advantage we have studying exposures on rocky coastlines. The waves erode blocks of limestone from the cliff and polish them up on the boulder-strewn beach. We can thus see our rocks in three dimensions rather than just the flat cross-section we would normally have. The trick, though, is to know from where in the section the boulders were derived!
We found some excellent sections through the numerous oncoids in our outcrops as well. We saw that many are formed around gastropod (snail) shells — very much like a Jurassic version I recently described as one of Wooster’s Fossils of the Week.
Tonight we will celebrate the 4th of July with a pizza dinner in downtown Kuressaare. It is as close to American food as we can get here. On this holiday we salute the Wooster Geologists Iceland Team also far from home on the front lines of science!
