Task: Question Generation
Input (English): The outcrop in the Figure 1.1 is at Checkerboard Mesa in Zion National Park, Utah. It has a very interesting pattern on it. As a geology student you may ask: how did this rock form? If you poke at the rock and analyze its chemistry you will see that its made of sand. In fact, the rock formation is called the Navajo sandstone. But knowing that the rock is sandstone doesnt tell you how it formed. It would be hard to design an experiment to show how this rock formed. But we can make observations now and apply them to this rock that formed long ago. James Hutton came up with this idea in the late 1700s. The present is the key to the past. He called this the principle of uniformitarianism. It is that if we can understand a geological process now and we find evidence of that same Checkerboard Mesa in Zion National Park, Utah. process in the past, then we can assume that the process operated the same way in the past. Hutton speculated that it has taken millions of years to shape the planet, and it is continuing to be changed. He said that there are slow, natural processes that changed, and continue to change, the planets landscape. For example, given enough time, a stream could erode a valley, or sediment could accumulate and form a new landform. Lets go back to that outcrop. What would cause sandstone to have layers that cross each other, a feature called cross-bedding? In the photo of the Mesquite sand dune in Death Valley National Park, California (Figure 1.2), we see that wind can cause cross-bedding in sand. Cross-bedding is due to changes in wind direction. There are also ripples caused by the wind waving over the surface of the dune. Since we can observe wind forming sand dunes with these patterns now, we have a good explanation for how the Navajo sandstone formed. The Navajo sandstone is a rock formed from ancient sand dunes in which wind direction changed from time to time. This is just one example of how geologists use observations they make today to unravel what happened in Earths past. Rocks formed from volcanoes, oceans, rivers, and many other features are deciphered by looking at the geological work those features do today. Click image to the left or use the URL below. URL:
Output (English): geologists can identify that wind changed direction in ancient sandstone from