Big Stories...in Miniature

Mini-faulted Jasper

I have just finishing polishing some recent finds from beaches along the Puget Sound shoreline that I've gathered over the past few months.  Two of my favorites are here.  The first, above, is one I like because it shows big ideas -- in miniature.  The rock is only 1.5 inches tall, but clearly shows the offset layers caused by movement along a very small, but obvious, fault. This phenomenon is common enough in nature, in scales both micro and macro, but it is not often displayed with such precision in a rock you can hold in your hand.

Petrified Wood

This is also a handsome miniature, an inch-long pebble of petrified wood. Not wildly colorful, but displaying the layers of both bark and what I can only assume is some darker heartwood. I knew I had a beauty when I found this one, but had to wait a month for it to go through the tumbling stages.

Both rocks beg the same question I mused about in a previous post: where could they have come from?  Found on a Seattle beach, both could very likely have been scraped off an outcrop in the BC coast range, or somewhere on Vancouver Island, by the massive glaciers of the Pleistocene. They could have been worn down to pebble size by ten thousand years of surf and tide. I'll probably never know.

The truth is, I just get a kick out of imagining the journey these rocks have taken to my desktop. Go figure.