Navajo Sandstone

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Navajo Sandstone

Navajo Sandstone is a geologic formation in the Glen Canyon Group

Glen Canyon Group

The Glen Canyon Group is a geologic group of formation s that is spread across the U.S. states of Nevada, Utah, northern Arizona, north west New Mexico and western Colorado....
that is spread across the U.S. states of northern Arizona

Arizona

The State of Arizona is a U.S. state located in the Southwestern United States of the United States. The capital and largest city is Phoenix, Arizona....
, northwest Colorado

Colorado

The State of Colorado is a U.S. state located in the Mountain States of the United States of America. Colorado may also be considered to be a part of the Western United States and Southwestern United States regions of the United States....
, Nevada

Nevada

Nevada is a U.S. state located in the Western United States of the United States of America. The capital is Carson City and the largest city is Las Vegas, Nevada....
, and Utah

Utah

The State of Utah is a western United States U.S. state of the United States. It was the List of U.S. states by date of statehood admitted to the United States on January 4, 1896....
(the unit is not part of a group in Nevada). It is located in the Colorado Plateau

Colorado Plateau

The Colorado Plateau, also called the Colorado Plateau Province, is a United States physiographic region of the Intermontane Plateaus, roughly centered on the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States....
province of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
. This rock formation is particularly prominent in southern Utah, where it forms the main attractions of a number of national parks and monuments including Zion National Park

Zion National Park

Zion National Park is a national park located in the Southwestern United States, near Springdale, Utah. A prominent feature of the 229-square mile park is Zion Canyon, 15 miles long and up to half a mile deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River....
, Capitol Reef National Park

Capitol Reef National Park

Capitol Reef National Park is a United States National Park, in south-central Utah. It is 100 miles long but fairly narrow. The park, established in 1971, preserves 378 mi? and is open all year, although May through September are the most popular months....
, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument contains 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah, the United States. There are three main regions: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Escalante River....
, and Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park is located in the United States of Utah, near city of Moab, Utah and preserves a colorful landscape eroded into countless canyons, mesas and buttes by the Colorado River and its tributaries....
.

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Navajo Sandstone is a geologic formation in the Glen Canyon Group

Glen Canyon Group

Arizona

The State of Arizona is a U.S. state located in the Southwestern United States of the United States. The capital and largest city is Phoenix, Arizona....
, northwest Colorado

Colorado

Nevada

Nevada is a U.S. state located in the Western United States of the United States of America. The capital is Carson City and the largest city is Las Vegas, Nevada....
, and Utah

Utah

Colorado Plateau

United States

Zion National Park

Capitol Reef National Park

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Canyonlands National Park

Kayenta Formation

The Kayenta Formation is a geologic formation in the Glen Canyon Group that is spread across the Colorado Plateau province of the United States, including northern Arizona, northwest Colorado, Nevada, and Utah....
and Wingate Sandstone

Wingate Sandstone

Wingate Sandstone is an Early Jurassic geologic formation in the Glen Canyon Group that is spread across the Colorado Plateau province of the United States, including northern Arizona, northwest Colorado, Nevada, and Utah....
(all three formations are in the same group). Together, these three formations can result in immense vertical cliffs of or more. Atop the cliffs, Navajo Sandstone often appears as massive rounded domes and bluffs that are generally white in color.

Because of its widespread occurrence, unique appearance, and dramatic outcrops, the Navajo Sandstone is one of the most famous rock formations in the world.

Appearance and Provenance

Navajo Sandstone frequently occurs as spectacular cliffs, cuesta

Cuesta

In structural geology and geomorphology, a cuesta is a ridge formed by gently tilted sedimentary rock strata in a homoclinal structure. Cuestas have a steep slope, where the rock layers are exposed on their edges, called an escarpment or, if more steep, a cliff....
s, domes, and bluffs rising from the desert floor. It can be distinguished from adjacent Jurassic sandstones by its white to light pink color, meter-scale cross-bedding

Cross-bedding

In geology, cross-bedding refers to inclined sedimentary rocks in a horizontal unit of rock. These tilted structures are deposits from bedforms such as ripples and dunes, and they indicate that the Sedimentary depositional environment contained a flowing fluid ....
, and distinctive rounded weathering.

The wide range of colors, i.e. crimson, vermillion, orange, salmon, peach, pink, gold, yellow, and white exhibited by the Navajo Sandstone reflect a long history of alteration of it by groundwater and other subsurface fluids over the last 190 million years. The different colors, except for white, are caused by the presence of varying mixtures and amounts of hematite

Hematite

Hematite, Spelling differences#Simplification of ae .28.C3.A6.29 and oe .28.C5.93.29 h?matite, is the mineral form of Iron oxide , one of several iron oxides....
, goethite

Goethite

Goethite, named after the Germany polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is an iron bearing oxide mineral found in soil and other low-temperature environments....
, and limonite

Limonite

Limonite is an ore consisting in a mixture of hydrated iron oxide-hydroxide of varying composition. The generic formula is frequently written as FeO?nH2O, although this is not entirely accurate as limonite often contains a varying amount of oxide compared to hydroxide....
filling the pore space within the quartz sand comprising the Navajo Sandstone. The iron originally came from the break down by weathering of iron-bearing silicate

Silicate

A silicate is a compound containing an anion in which one or more central silicon atoms are surrounded by electronegative ligands. This definition is broad enough to include species such as hexafluorosilicate , [SiF6]2-, but the silicate species that are encountered most often consist of silicon with oxygen as the ligand...
minerals. Initially, the iron accumulated as iron-oxide coatings, which formed slowly after the sand had been deposited. Later, after having been deeply buried, reducing fluids, i.e. water containing hydrocarbons, flowed through the thick red sand, which once comprised the Navajo Sandstone. The dissolution of the iron coatings by the reducing fluids bleached large volumes of the Navajo Sandstone a brilliant white. Reducing fluids transported the iron in solution until they mixed with oxidizing groundwater. Where the oxidizing and reducing fluids mixed, the iron precipitated within the Navajo Sandstone. Depending on local variations within the permeability, porosity, fracturing, and other inherent rock properties of the sandstone, varying mixtures of hematite, goethite, and limonite precipitated within spaces between quartz grains. Variations in the type and proportions of iron oxides precipitated resulted in the different crimson, vermillion, orange, salmon, peach, pink, gold, and yellow colors of the Navajo Sandstone. The precipitation of iron oxides also formed laminea, corrugated layers, columns, and pipes of ironstone within the Navajo Sandstone. Being harder and more resistant to erosion than the surrounding sandstone, the ironstone weathered out as ledges, walls, fins, "flags", towers, and other minor features, which stick out and above the local landscape in unusual shapes .

Age and history of investigation

The age of the Navajo Sandstone is somewhat controversial. It may originate from the Late Triassic

Late Triassic

The Late Triassic is in the geologic timescale the third and final of three epoch s of the Triassic geological timescale. The corresponding series is known as the Upper Triassic....
but is at least as old as the Early Jurassic

Early Jurassic

The Early Jurassic epoch is the earliest of three epochs of the Jurassic period. The Early Jurassic starts immediately after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event and ends at the start of the Middle Jurassic ....
stages Pliensbachian

Pliensbachian

The Pliensbachian is a faunal stage of the Early Jurassic epoch . It spans the time between 189.6 ? 1.5 annum and 183 ? 1.5 Ma .The stage takes its name from the town of Pliensbach, some 30 km east of Stuttgart in Germany....
and Toarcian

Toarcian

The Toarcian Stage was the last faunal stage of the Early Jurassic period. It is usually used to cover the period from 183 annum to 175 Ma .The Toarcian stage began with the Toarcian turnover, the extinction event that set it apart from the previous Pliensbachian stage....
. There is no type locality

Type locality (geology)

In some natural sciences, type locality is the typical or representative location and is typically the first example of a newly discovered or described object....
of the name. It was simply named for the 'Navajo Country'

Navajo people

The Navajo or Din? of the Southwestern United States are the largest Native Americans in the United States tribe of North America....
of the southwestern United States

Southwestern United States

The Southwestern area of the United States could be defined as the states west of the Mississippi River, with the qualification of a certain northern limit, such as the 37th parallel north, 38th parallel north, 39th parallel north, or 40th parallel north line....
. The two major subunits of the Navajo are the Lamb Point Tongue (Cedar City area) and the Shurtz Sandstone Tongue (Kanab area)..

The Navajo Sandstone was originally named as the uppermost formation of the La Plata Group by Gregory and Stone in 1917. Baker reassigned it as the upper formation of Glen Canyon Group in 1936. Its age was modified by Lewis and others in 1961. The name was originally not used in northwest Colorado and northeast Utah, where the name 'Glen Canyon Sandstone' was preferred. Its age was modified again by Padian in 1989.

Places found

Navajo Sandstone outcrops are found in these geologic locations:

Black Mesa Basin
Great Basin
Great Basin

The Great Basin is a large, arid region of the western United States. Its boundaries depend on how it is defined. Its most common definition is the contiguous drainage basin, roughly between the Wasatch Mountains, in Utah and the Sierra Nevada , that has no natural outlet to the sea....
province
Colorado Plateau
Colorado Plateau

The Colorado Plateau, also called the Colorado Plateau Province, is a United States physiographic region of the Intermontane Plateaus, roughly centered on the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States....
Paradox Basin
Paradox Basin

Paradox Basin is an asymmetric foreland basin located in southeast Utah and southwest Colorado. The basin is a large elongate northwest to southeast oriented depression formed during the late Paleozoic Era....
Piceance Basin
Piceance Basin

The Piceance Basin is a geologic structural basin in northwestern Colorado, in the United States. It includes geologic formations from Cambrian to Holocene in age, but the thickest section is comprised of rocks from the Cretaceous Period....
Plateau sedimentary province
San Juan Basin
San Juan Basin

The San Juan Basin is a drainage basin and geologic structural basin in the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States United States; its main portion covers around 4,600 square miles, encompassing much of northwestern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Utah....
Uinta Basin
Uinta Uplift
Uncompaghre Uplift

The formation is also found in these parklands (incomplete list):

Arches National Park
Arches National Park

Arches National Park is a United States national park in eastern Utah. It is known for preserving over 2,000 natural arch, including the world-famous Delicate Arch, in addition to a variety of unique geological resources and formations....
Canyonlands National Park
Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park is located in the United States of Utah, near city of Moab, Utah and preserves a colorful landscape eroded into countless canyons, mesas and buttes by the Colorado River and its tributaries....
Capitol Reef National Park
Capitol Reef National Park

Capitol Reef National Park is a United States National Park, in south-central Utah. It is 100 miles long but fairly narrow. The park, established in 1971, preserves 378 mi? and is open all year, although May through September are the most popular months....
Zion National Park
Zion National Park

Zion National Park is a national park located in the Southwestern United States, near Springdale, Utah. A prominent feature of the 229-square mile park is Zion Canyon, 15 miles long and up to half a mile deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River....
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument contains 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah, the United States. There are three main regions: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Escalante River....
Dinosaur National Monument
Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument is a U.S. National Monument located on the southeast flank of the Uinta Mountains on the border between the United States states of Colorado and Utah at the confluence of the Green River and Yampa River Rivers....
Colorado National Monument
Colorado National Monument

Colorado National Monument is a part of the National Park Service near the city of Grand Junction, Colorado, in the western part of the state. It is a semi-desert land high on the Colorado Plateau....

Vertebrate fauna

Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Dinosaur Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate animals of Landform ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous Period , when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event.... s of the
Taxa	Presence	Notes	Images
Genus: Ammosaurus Ammosaurus *Ammosaurus* is a genus of sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Early and Middle Jurassic Period of North America. At 4 meters in length, it was small compared to some other members of its suborder, which included the largest organisms ever to walk the Earth.... Ammosaurus cf. major	Geographically located in Arizona, USA.
Order: Ornithischia Ornithischia Ornithischia or Predentata is an extinct order of beaked, herbivore dinosaurs. The name ornithischia is derived from the Ancient Greek ornitheos meaning 'of a bird' and ischion meaning 'hip joint'.... Tracks.	Geographically located in Arizona, USA.
Infraorder: Prosauropoda Prosauropoda Prosauropoda or prosauropods were a group of early herbivorous dinosaurs that lived during the Triassic and early Jurassic periods. They were frequently the predominant herbivore in their environment, and quickly reached large size .... Possible tracks.	Geographically located in Arizona, USA.
Genus: Segisaurus Segisaurus *Segisaurus* is a genus of small coelophysoid theropod dinosaur, that measured approximately 1 metre in length. The only known specimen was discovered in 1933 in early Jurassic strata in Tsegi Canyon, Arizona, for which it was named.... S. halli	Geographically located in Arizona, USA.
Suborder: Theropoda Theropoda Theropods are a group of bipedal saurischian dinosaurs. Although they were primarily carnivorous, a number of theropod families evolved herbivore during the Cretaceous Period .... Indeterminate remains. Tracks.	Geographically located in Arizona, USA. Geographically located in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, USA.

Iron oxide concretions (Moqui marbles)

The Navajo Sandstone is also well known among rockhounds, planetary geologists

Planetary geology

Planetary geology, alternatively known as astrogeology or exogeology, is a planetary science discipline concerned with the geology of the celestial bodies such as the planets and their moons, asteroids, comets, and meteorites....
, and practitioners of New Age

New Age

New Age is a decentralized western culture social movement and new religious movement that seeks universality Truth and the attainment of the highest individual human potential....
religions for the hundreds of thousands of iron oxide

Iron oxide

Iron oxides are chemical compounds composed of iron and oxygen. Altogether, there are sixteen known iron oxides and oxyhydroxides....
concretion

Concretion

A concretion is a volume of sedimentary rock in which a mineral cement fills the porosity . Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape, although irregular shapes also occur....
s. They are believed to represent an extension of Hopi

Hopi

The Hopi are American Indians in the United States people who primarily live on the 12,635 km? Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi Reservation is entirely surrounded by the much larger Navajo Reservation....
Native American traditions regarding ancestor worship ("moqui" translates to "the dead" in the Hopi language). Informally, they are called "Moqui marbles" after the local proposed Moqui native American tribe (they have alternately been called "Moqui balls," "Moki marbles," "shaman stones" or "thunderballs" by various enthusiasts). Thousands of these concretions weather out of outcrops of the Navajo Sandstone within south-central and southeastern Utah within an area extending from Zion National Park eastward to Arches and Canyonland national parks. They are quite abundant within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument .

The iron oxide concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone exhibit a wide variety of sizes and shapes. Their shape ranges from spheres to discs; buttons; spiked balls; cylindrical hollow pipe-like forms; and other odd shapes. Although many of these concretions are fused together like soap bubbles, many more also occur as isolated concretions, which range in diameter from the size of peas to baseballs. The surface of these spherical concretions can range from being very rough to quite smooth. Some of the concretions are grooved spheres with ridges and grooves around their circumference .

The abundant concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone consist of sandstone cemented together by hematite

Hematite

Hematite, Spelling differences#Simplification of ae .28.C3.A6.29 and oe .28.C5.93.29 h?matite, is the mineral form of Iron oxide , one of several iron oxides....
(Fe₂O₃), and goethite

Goethite

Goethite, named after the Germany polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is an iron bearing oxide mineral found in soil and other low-temperature environments....
(FeOOH). The iron forming these concretions came from the break down of iron-bearing silicate minerals

Silicate minerals

The silicate minerals make up the largest and most important class of rock-forming minerals, comprising approximately 90 percent of the crust of the Earth....
by weathering to form iron oxide coatings on other grains. During later diagenesis

Diagenesis

In geology and oceanography, diagenesis is any chemical, physical, or biological change undergone by a sediment after its initial deposition and during and after its lithification, exclusive of surface alteration and metamorphism....
of the Navajo Sandstone while deeply buried, reducing fluids

Redox

Redox describes all chemical reactions in which atoms have their oxidation number changed.This can be either a simple redox process such as the oxidation of carbon to yield carbon dioxide or the reduction of carbon by hydrogen to yield methane , or it can be a complex process such as the oxidation of sugar in the human body through a ser...
, likely hydrocarbons, dissolved these coatings. When the reducing fluids containing dissolved iron mixed with oxidizing groundwater

Groundwater

Groundwater is water located beneath the ground surface in soil porosity spaces and in the fractures of lithologic formations. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated deposit is called an aquifer when it can yield a usable quantity of water....
, they and the dissolved iron were oxidized. This caused the iron to precipitate out as hematite and goethite to form the innumerable concretions found in the Navajo Sandstone. These concretions are regarded as terrestrial analogues of the hematite spherules, called alternately Martian "blueberries" or more technically Martian spherules

Martian spherules

Martian spherules are the abundant spherical hematite inclusions discovered by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity rover at Meridiani Planum on the planet Mars ....
, which the Opportunity rover

Opportunity rover

MER-B , known as Opportunity, is the second of the two rover s of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully at Meridiani Planum on Mars on January 25, 2004 05:05 Ground UTC , three weeks after its twin Spirit rover had landed on the other side of the planet....
found at Meridiani Planum

Meridiani Planum

Meridiani Planum is a plain located 2 degrees south of Mars ' equator , in the westernmost portion of Terra Meridiani. It hosts a rare occurrence of gray crystalline hematite....
on Mars

MARS

In cryptography, MARS is a block cipher that was IBM's submission to the Advanced Encryption Standard process. MARS was selected as an AES finalist in August 1999, after the AES2 conference in March 1999, where it was voted as the fifth and last finalist algorithm....
.

Works cited

Averitt, P., Wilson, R.F., Detterman, J.S., Harshbarger, J.W. and Repenning, C.A., 1955, "Revisions in correlation and nomenclature of Triassic and Jurassic formations in southwestern Utah and northern Arizona", American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 39, no. 12, p. 2515-2524
Baker, A.A., 1936, "Geology of the Monument Valley-Navajo Mountain region, San Juan County, Utah", U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 865, 106 p., Also, U.S. Geological Survey Oil and Gas Investigations Map OM-168, and Bulletin 1087-D.
Gregory, H.E. and Stone, R.W., 1917, "Geology of the Navajo country; a reconnaissance of parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah", U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper, 93, 161 p.
Chan, M.A. and W.T. Parry, 2002, Utah Geological Survey Public Information Series 77:1-19.
Chan, M.A., B.B. Beitler, W.T. Parry, J. Ormo, and G. Komatsu, 2005. . GSA Today, v. 15, n. 8, pp. 4-10.
Lewis, G.E., Irwin, J.H. and Wilson, R.F., 1961, "Age of the Glen Canyon Group (Triassic and Jurassic) on the Colorado Plateau", Geological Society of America Bulletin v. 72, no. 9, p. 1437-1440
Padian, K., 1989, "Presence of dinosaur Scelidosaurus indicates Jurassic age for the Kayenta Formation (Glen Canyon Group, northern Arizona)", Geological Society of America, Geology, v. 17, no. 5, p. 438-441
Poole, F.G. and Stewart, J.H., 1964, "Chinle Formation and Glen Canyon Sandstone in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado, IN Geological Survey research 1964", U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper, 501-D, p. D30-D39
Accessed 18 March 2006 (public domain text)

Navajo Sandstone

Appearance and Provenance

Age and history of investigation

Places found

Vertebrate fauna

Dinosaurs

Iron oxide concretions (Moqui marbles)

Works cited

Further reading

Internet - general

Scientific publications