Random Roadcuts #6: Central Nevada on US-6
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- Learn to "READ" the rocks with this innovative video series. Here, geology professor Shawn Willsey investigates a random roadcut, makes observations, and formulates basic interpretations. This interactive series aims to assist you, the viewer, in deciphering rocks and landscapes. Here in Episode #6, we visit an interesting roadcut along US-6 in central Nevada. GPS Location: 38.79439, -115.39233
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Your Random Roadcuts series is awesome and so relatable for the average amateur or armchair geology enthusiast like me - thank you!
Gotta say: you'd be fun on a road trip Shawn. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us all.
This reminds me so much of my youth. My Dad was a geologist working for the mines in South Africa during the 60/70's - every road trip / holiday turned into a side excursion looking at 'something interesting'. Thank you for the nice memories :)
It is amazing to imagine that landscape once hosting an aquatic undersea scape.
The more I know when going out, Rockhounding, the better a Rockhound I am. This is great! I appreciate the knowledge you share. Thank you and RockOn!!!
I'm digging these random road cuts . It's like going on a field trip with you and trying to figure out the rocks. I'm 69 but really finding thus stuff interesting. I'm so baffled on how these road cuts are formed . The bending of the rocks blows me away.
Heyyyyyyy…. It’s the volcano guy! My dad and I love you ❤️. Thank you for everything you do.
Another very cool video. I really enjoy these. Thee's a sense of exploration, but also the basic observation and then interpreting what those observations may be telling us. Great fun.
Thanks for putting these together. Random Roadcuts is a great series.
I'm loving this series. I like how the road cut just looks like a meh piece of rock when you first show it, but then has incredible detail when you start to look at it closely.
I love these random roadcuts! So much fun and interesting! Thank you again for your expertise and sharing!
Nice stop. I've rolled thru there, dozens of times. Now I have an explanation of what's going on there. Thank You. TAKE CARE..
Definitely another banger. Love the distinction between observation and interpretation. Something we can all apply, and more broadly than just geology.
Was fortunate to go on extended family vacations in the American West. Had I my life to do over again I might very well have chosen Geology. Your interesting and informative videos allow me to enjoy some of these areas again - thank you.
BTW, I believe both the singular and plural are ‘Sierra.’ High SIERRA, not high Sierras. FWIW. ✌🏼
Nice one, the fractures/breccia atop the reddish sharp contact is dramatic and intriguing-
Hi 😍 we are in Henderson, NV ! Nice to see other parts , being explored !
Love road cuts. Thank you.
Professor Shawn you are the most educated and wise person I know in all of Idaho. I do enjoy your channel.
I look forward to the random road cuts on here. Makes my evening.
Thank goodness for the informative random road cut conversation while we wait for the Icelandic volcano 😅👏🏻👏🏻.
Actually, I find it more interesting regardless
Cool man thx …greetings from Austria 🇦🇹 🍀🍀🍀✌️😜✌️🍀🍀🍀🌎🔥🔥🔥
I love the geology of southern Nevada and eastern California. With the lack of foliage, it's easy to see the amazing structures that have formed. Not too long ago we came across a large obsidian dyke just outside of Shoshone, CA. Yep, at a roadside cut. I'm lucky that one of my good friends is a geologist and I've been able to learn so much from him. 🙂
I know that site! I did contracting work out of Ely for several years, and I'd make a weekly trip back and forth on U.S. 6. I always enjoyed that little winding canyon stretch of Currant Creek at the south end of the White Pines. A very short distance to your southwest, if I remember right, a nice pattern of what looks like cavern filling sediments is exposed high up on the cliff. I always wanted to spend more time scrabbling around that area -- I'm so glad you're finally doing it for me!
Thank you for your updates, my husband and I enjoy them, very realistic and informative. Watching from Vancouver Island, BC, Canada 🇨🇦
Thanks!
Love the section of faulting showing one thrusting under the other. Perfect picture of a subduction on today’s coast.
'Roadside style' is awesome! On the fly. Thank you Professor.
Hiking has definitely become more interesting since watching your channel! Rocks have a story to tell!!
Speaking of Ely Nevada. My last video was about the charcoal oven ruins that are there and the deforestation that took place from 1877-1879. It only took 2 years to strip the "Elderberry Canyon" and surrounding mountains. Love your videos. Thank You
ありがとうございます！
A busy Random Roadcut with 130 million years plus of activity over that time. This was the bottom of an inland sea at
first and ebbed away and came back time and time again. Eventually the land won out and moved upwards ( since it
is the basin and range of Nevada) and with weathering cracked, moved from being split by a fault or two. Wow what
a nice place to interpret all that is going on here professor.
Your roadcuts videos remind me of trips some twenty years ago with a professor out of College of Marin (Bay Area). We did a lot of stops all the way out to Utah over several field trips, lots of camping in remote areas, and adventures. Will never forget those, and your videos take me back. I might actually have to go do some roadcuts myself with acid bottle and hammer in hand…
Thanks!😁
Love these videos 😊 i live in the canary islands and your videos have taught me loads
Thx Shawn...rocks tell a story and you are the interpretor...
Always interesting.
Thanks for this "Road Cut" Shawn. As a commercial driver I frequent this area and sleep occasionally just 1000 yards or so north. I'll rockhound when time permits bringing the occasional sample home. 'Always wondered how those incredibly small veins formed. To the trained eye, Nevada is a wonderland of geologic activity for the casual observer and in my humble opinion, an overlooked treasure trove of activity.
Fascinating! Every one of these road-cut! videos you do, I want to rush there and see it for myself. 😄
Great stuff, Shawn. Carry on with this type of analysis. That's the way we all do it, don't we?
Thanks again for another great roadcut. Looking forward to driving 6 soon. Love Nevada.
This was so awesome! I feel like I’m on The Team. 🤓 I’m a complete noob at geology, and this was extremely accessible and easy to follow. I’m feeling inspired to go look at the road up to Crowders Mountain, now!
Production tip. If you have lots of background noise (vehicles, wind) you can take your MP4 file and drop into a spectral demix website and you can separate voice from noise. The output is an audio WAV. The separation algorithms are meant for music and vocals but it works well on speech.
Learn a lot every time, Shawn. Those calcite veins! Amazing. The thin red break between rock types with crumbly rocks above and below: could that have been something really hot 🥵 like ash falling and scorching? I guess it couldn’t get between the rocks. You know, this is simpler than I realized. Rather than being overwhelmed just look at and figure out each rock type by itself first. Then look at contacts which might give more overall information. Pondering. Thanks again.
A great lesson for me today thank for sharing.
Thanks Detective Willsey!
The man that I let get away was a Geologist. I wish that didn’t happen. He would have taught me so much.😥
I enjoy learning. Thank you
Your information makes a long road more interesting. I knew nothing the one round trip I spent riding on that highway. We did a round trip through that road from Denver to Colfax CA. I knew nothing about the geology or even the history of that hwy. I knew some Donner Pass history and a tiny bit about the great salt lake. I learned lots of genealogy about the Colfax area when we got there. We were on trip to meet my mother in law so she could show my husband where he was born. And to introduce him to what family was left in the area. Otherwise I had no way to learn about the area. It would have been nice to have a geologist along!
Thanks for another nice lunch field trip!
Nice drag folding along that reverse fault @7:15
12:22 - Looks somewhat “snakey” to me. Do you often run across them in your ramblings?
Not very often.
@@shawnwillseyThat’s probably good! 😃
haha!! just had a lecture about this outcrop earlier today in my structure class. awesome!
fun field trip
my first one with you!
thank you
love your introductory graphics 😀
My wife did that.
Thank you sir.
My bumper sticker reads, "I pull over for road cuts". Over the years I have found neat fossils and minerals at road cuts I have stopped to look at.
Look again at that shale piece split open around 9:40
The first half had a visible leaf fossil on the left hand side near the edge !
I saw it too
Nothing more exciting than a nice, healthy pegmatitic granite! 🥇
Great random roadcut. Will the sea make a return someday?
Not for a very long time if it does.
Wow. Pretty faulty episode. Nice.
We pay attention to earthquakes and tsunami on the BC Canada, Pacific Ocean side. Thank you!
This is really cool that you go out and show this information. is the red layer iron that is oxidizing? and what type of acid are you using to get that reaction? is it like the baking soda and vinegar thing? acetic acid? or something like that?
Even stronger stuff, like a hydrochloric acid . Will get a reaction that makes calcium chloride and carbon dioxide
gas bubbles.
thank you.
@@charlesrichter3854
This is a great area. Make sure to swing on over to Great Basin National Park, that's one that few people know about.
I did a video from top of wheeler peak in GBNP.
@@shawnwillsey
I'll have to check that out!
The rocks with the veins remind my a lot what is on Mt. Borah.
Same rock type and similar age.
@@shawnwillsey That's uplifting information! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Shawn we need a go-along book so we can reference later
This was great! Thank you. Reminds me to bring a hammer next time i go hiking in the woods behind my house. Lots of limestone jutting out between the trees with cool ocean-y fossils right where i am in north Texas.
great👍👍
Interesting
Could you make a video about campi flegrei in light of recent earthquakes? 🙏🏼
I've always wanted to bring a geologist with me off-roading in southern Nevada to explain exactly this type of stuff to me when I see it. Do you know if the people at the geology department at UNLV will accept beer in payment for them to go off-roading and teach me rocks?
Maybe. Or take a class that has field trips.
I have an interesting cut in mind (in Nevada) White River narrows, where highway 318 cuts through. The features remind me of CRBG, but the color is not similar. Some of it looks like sandstone? Hardly random 😁
Yes, I know that area. It's actually tuff (consolidated ash).
I will NEVER look at a road cut the same, thanks.
Have you ever visited the road cut between Shoshone CA and Chicago valley to the east? It has some faulting and a spectacular intrusion.
Keith, If you're referring to the road cut on Road 178 heading toward Pahrump, I agree that's a spectacular stop and well worth a video. I'm not sure about an intrusion there, but there is a wonderful pyroclastic flow sheet with a black vitrophere (volcanic glass) layer in the middle. It's one of my favorite roadside geology stops.
Send me GPS coordinates.
From Google Earth: 35d 59' 49" N, 116d 13' 10" W. It juxtaposes some nice normal faulting with an excellent cross section of welding zonation.
Hey bud ! My question is up on the roadcut after looking at the faulted area, some of the loose shale had a blue color, looked sort of like a cobalt blue color ? Was this a color or just the light making the color change ? And the unit with the rubble base could it be an unconformity rubble zone ? Thanks for your efforts.
I would assume the high levels of oxidation and extensive stress fracturing, and brecciation, probably indicate high temperature fluid interactions as well, given lack of igneous rock :)
Does a sharp contact coupled with a change in rock type mean a cataclysmic event ?
on route... 6 till 6...
So we hear about shale all the time as a place where oil can be found via fracking... Can you ever find oil in shale that's exposed like these? Or even if not, can you teach us how shale oil works using some outcrop of shale like this?
I've seen oily shale road cuts in western Wyoming and NE Utah.
I was thinking the thin red layer might be K-T boundary
Where can I get some rock testing acid?
Could you pls explain why the earth drops as the magma rises to the surface ,,, if you see this tks
❤
Just wanna clarify I spell now as knaw like meow but with a n - neow ok thank you
👍
That thin layer of a reddish material appears to me to be fault gouge
*SO* Nevada :)
With the number of geologists filming faults & the worldwide distribution of earthquakes, calculate the probability Shawn will become famous catching rocks shearing on film?
Find a roadcut in the bedded cherts on the upper plate of the Roberts Mts. Thrust. Not even you will be able to figure out what's going on!
That's some messy stuff for sure.
A "real banger" 😆
you were a couple klicks from a gold prospect, with VG. Too bad you did not visit.
geology field camp😊
Yeah blood all right knaw I’m very pleased to see that your heading out my a way my neck of da woods so to speaks. Anywho I’m originally from da Oak Yeah Oakland smoking and wanna thank yea for da shows you provide providence yes indeed oh that word just a came up figuring how da spell provide and shit. Yes sir dismissed
Geology professor Shawn Willsey is at fault here...
Thanks!
Thank you.
Thanks!
Thank you!
Thanks!