The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Archibald Geikie

Fig. 185.—Section of tuff, showing intercalations of black impure chert, west of Closenychollagh Point, near Castletown, Isle of Man.

One of the most singular features of these sedimentary intercalations is the occurrence of the black cherty material. It may generally be observed best developed at the bottom and top of each group of included strata. Looking at the lumps of this substance scattered through the adjoining tuffs, we might at first take them for ejected fragments, and such no doubt may have been the derivation of some of them. But further examination will show that, as a rule, they are of a concretionary nature, and were formed in situ contemporaneously with or subsequent to the deposition of the tuffs. The accompanying section ([Fig. 185]) represents the manner in which the chert is distributed through two or three square yards of tuff overlying one of the calcareous groups. The material has been segregated not only into lumps, but into veins and bands, which, though on the whole parallel with the general stratification-planes of the deposits, sometimes run irregularly in tongues or strings across these planes, as shown in [Fig. 186], where the dark chert band which overlies the limestones and shales sends a tongue upwards for several inches into the overlying tuff.

That these interstratified calcareous and muddy strata were laid down in water of some considerable depth may be inferred from their general lithological characters. The dark carbonaceous aspect of the limestones points to the probable intermingling of much decayed vegetation with the remains of the calcareous organisms of which these strata chiefly consist. The thin unimportant bands or partings of dark shale show that only the finest muddy sediment reached the quiet depths in which the strata were deposited, while the macerated fern-fragments suggest a long flotation and ultimate entombment of terrestrial vegetation borne seawards from some neighbouring land.

Fig. 186.—Section of intercalated dark limestone, shale and chert in the tuff south of Poyll Vaaish Bay, Isle of Man.
1. Limestones and shales; 2. Chert; 3. Tuff.

The cherty bands and nodules, like the flints of the chalk, bear their testimony to the quiet character of the sedimentation in rather deep water beyond the limits within which the sediment from the land was mainly accumulated on the sea-bottom. The origin of these siliceous parts of the series of deposits has still to be investigated. Whether or not they are to be referred to organic causes like chalk-flints, and the radiolarian cherts of the Lower Silurian system, they furnish a fresh example of the remarkable association of such siliceous material with volcanic phenomena, which has now been observed in many widely separated areas all over the world.

If we next turn to the stratification of the tuffs, we obtain further evidence of undisturbed conditions of deposition on the sea-floor. The bedding of these volcanic masses, though distinct, appears for the most part to be due rather to the eruption and settlement of alternately finer and coarser detritus than to any marked drifting and rearrangement of these materials by current-action into different layers. Throughout the series of tuffs, indeed, there is, on the whole, a notable absence of any structure suggestive of strong currents or of wave-action in the dispersal and reassortment of the volcanic detritus. The ashes and stones were discharged in such a way as to gather irregularly over the sea-floor into ridges and hollows. There does not seem to have been sufficient movement in the bottom water to level down these inequalities of surface, for we find that they remained long enough to allow twelve feet or more of calcareous and siliceous ooze to gather in the hollows, while the intervening ridges still stood uneffaced until buried under the next fall of ashes. At rare intervals some transient current or deeper wave may have reached the bottom and spread out the volcanic detritus lying there. Such exceptional disturbances of the still water are not improbably indicated by occasional well-defined stratification, and even by distinct false-bedding, in certain finer layers of tuff.

The materials of the tuffs are remarkably uniform in character and conspicuously volcanic in origin. With the exception of occasional blocks of limestone, which range up to masses several feet, and occasionally several yards, in diameter, the dust, lapilli and included stones consist entirely of fragmentary basic lava, so persistent in its lithological features that we may regard its slightly different varieties as merely marking different conditions of the same rock. The accumulation of pumiceous ash in this southern coast of the Isle of Man is one of the most remarkable in Britain. As Mr. Hobson has well shown, the matrix of this tuff consists of irregular lapilli, representing what may have been various conditions of solidification in one original volcanic magma. This magma he has described as an "augite-porphyrite" or olivine-basalt. Some of the lapilli, as he noted, consist of a pumice "crowded with vesicles which occupy more space than the solid part"; others show nearly as many vesicles, but the glass is made brown by the number of its fine dust-like inclusions; a third type presents the cells and cell-walls in nearly equal proportions. The same observer found that where the substance is most cellular the vesicles, fairly uniform in size, measure about a tenth of a millimetre in longest diameter.

An interesting feature of the tuffs is the abundant occurrence of loose felspar crystals throughout the whole group up to the highest visible strata. These crystals, sometimes nearly an inch in length, appear conspicuously as white spots on weathered surfaces of the rock. They are so much decayed, however, that it is difficult to extract them entire. On the most cursory inspection they are observed to enclose blebs of a greenish substance like the material that fills up the vesicles in the pumiceous fragments and in the pieces of cellular lava.

I have not ascertained the original source of these scattered felspars. In one of the dykes on the north side of the agglomerate at Scarlet Point, as was pointed out by Mr. Hobson, large crystals of plagioclase occur in the melaphyre, but the felspars in the tuffs and agglomerates differ so much from these that we cannot suppose them to have come from the explosion of such a rock. I failed to detect any other mineral in detached crystals in the tuffs, but a more diligent search might reveal such, and afford some grounds for speculating on the probable nature of the magma from the explosion of which the scattered crystals were derived. It is at least certain that this magma must have included a large proportion of plagioclase crystals.