Let's Talk Outcrop

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Fold Friday: Iranian Folds

Fold Friday: Iranian Folds

A series of satellite photos showing regional folding in Iran.

Jacob Clarke's avatar
Jacob Clarke
Oct 25, 2024
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Let's Talk Outcrop
Let's Talk Outcrop
Fold Friday: Iranian Folds
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Welcome to Let’s Talk Outcrop, your newsletter all about Earth Science. I send weekly Tuesday and Friday emails explaining cutting-edge research, interesting topics in Earth Science, or examining fundamental Earth processes.

This series, Fold Friday, is exclusively for paid subscribers and offers an in-depth summary of some amazing folded formations I have found.

If you are currently a free subscriber and would like to upgrade to support my work and gain access to this series and the full archive sign-up using the link below.

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Prepping for this article, I was scanning through satellite imagery, as I tend to find myself doing from time to time, looking at the incredible geologic landscape of the Middle East. The region here is amazingly complicated tectonically speaking, and offers enough puzzles to satisfy any geologist or tectonophysicist for several careers over. Hundreds of millions of years of tectonic history are recorded here, creating some of the most complicated landscapes in the world.

Surrounded by deserts and heavily weathered by dust and wind, the arid climate beautifully exposes the underlying geology, creating a space where geologic analyses can be performed almost entirely through satellites alone.

I hope you enjoy my brief explanations and bask in the wondrous images below.

Here is the region of focus. Central Iran, sitting within the mountains formed from the creation of Pangaea. The mountains in Iran are part of the mountain belt formed during the closing of the Tethys Sea that existed between the two continents of Gondwana and Laurasia. The closing of the Tethys and the collision between the two continents was part of the formation of Pangaea.

The geology of central Iran is considered the most complex and diverse, where rocks spanning nearly 550 million years are exposed. Rocks here record multiple stages of collision, extension, and obviously for the readers here, FOLDING!!

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