Wooster Geologists

The Estonia team at Panga Cliff on the northern coast of Saaremaa (N58.55321°, E22.28577°). Note the gorgeous weather.

KURESSAARE, SAAREMAA ISLAND, ESTONIA–It was an exquisitely crystalline day of blue and gray here with clear skies, a sparkling sea, and beautiful limestones just waiting for the touch of our hammers. We continued to explore the Lower Silurian (Wenlock) of the Saaremaa coast, fascinated with the numbers and varieties of fossils we found. These rocks have been carefully cataloged by biostratigraphers, so we know exactly how they fit into the larger geological picture in time and space. This gives us the opportunity to concentrate on the paleontological and sedimentological questions before us.

There is a distinctive and widespread horizon in these rocks of stromatoporoids, a kind of calcareous sponge which built on the shallow seafloor stony mounds up to the size of large cabbages. These stromatoporoids were bored by at least two kinds of worm-like organisms, and then encrusted by corals and bryozoans. Some corals even grew inside the skeleton of the sponges in a kind of symbiosis. There are many riddles here about how these fossils are preserved, how the community was structured, and what sort of environment it flourished and was eventually buried in. This will be the basis of Rob McConnell’s Independent Study thesis. We will all return to this site in a few days to do the detailed work of measuring, counting and collecting.

Rob and Palmer closely examine stromatoporoid fossils found in place at the foot of the Liiva Cliff on the northern coast of Saaremaa (N58.57553°, E22.36821°).

Rob, by the way, was reunited with his luggage late this afternoon, so he’s a happy man.

Rob McConnell and Palmer Shonk at the Uugu Cliff locality, Muhu Island, Estonia (N58.67136°, E23.23988°). The blue Baltic Sea is in the background.

KURESSAARE, SAAREMAA ISLAND, ESTONIA–Like the Iceland team, our first full field day in Estonia was spent in reconnaissance on the islands of Muhu and Saaremaa. We visited an abandoned quarry just north of Koguva to examine Lower Silurian (Wenlock) dolomitic mud mounds and limestones near Koguva, and then went to the Uugu Cliff which exposes a similar sequence but a little younger within the Silurian. Caves are found high in the cliff which were cut by waves of Ancylus Lake, a freshwater precursor of the Baltic Sea between 9500 and 8000 BCE. There are also trenches on the top of the bluffs dug by Tsarist Russian soldiers during World War I.

Later in the afternoon we collected Wenlockian fossils at the seaside Paramaja Cliff which had been weathered out of their rock matrices by the waves. We found a good collection of rhynchonellid brachiopods, strophomenid brachiopods, rugose corals, tabulate corals, encrinurid trilobites, crinoid stems, nautiloids, and cornulitids. (Like music, isn’t it?)

Palmer and Rob in the traditional fossil collecting position at Paramaja Cliff (N58.61531°, E22.89790°). Palmer was not particularly happy about the long walk through the stinging nettles.

Tomorrow we continue our survey of Silurian localities. The weather could not be better. (It sure beats sleet in Svalbard and mosquitoes in Russia, I must say!) Rob’s luggage is scheduled to arrive at our Kuressaare hotel in the afternoon, so we’ll finally have our full kit.