Greetings friends and members of the community. Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in a day of geological exploration with colleagues from the Geological Survey of Cuba. The objective was to identify some important geological formations with rocks that tell a great story of the remote past of our island when they were formed.
First we reached a quarry area inside a tunnel, where we observed marly rocks with high content of calcium carbonate and clay, which were formed millions of years ago in a marine environment, and today are extracted for use in construction materials.
From there we went to visit another quarrying region where we observed some steep hills with limestone and marl rocks of great whiteness, which apparently correlated with those that had been seen inside the previous quarrying tunnel. When we were in front of them, we were actually seeing the remains of an ancient marine sedimentation in the bottoms of ancient deep sublittoral zones of the island of Cuba, today emerged.
Finally, we went to a somewhat more distant region to observe another different geological formation, in a field with some elevated boulders of rocks that are very old, and were formed because of the great asteroid that millions of years ago fell near the current Yucatan Peninsula and ended the life of dinosaurs and other species. That great asteroid generated gigantic tsunami waves that destroyed part of the continental rims and produced enormous submarine avalanches that when reaching the bottom of the deep parts accumulated a great volume of material. Today, after millions of years, these materials converted into rock are emerged and in sight of our eyes, being also very useful as construction material in urbanization.
Thus, yesterday was undoubtedly a great day for the observation of some of the Cuban geological formations, which told us their history and offered a window to the past.
All images are my own, captured with the camera of my Samsung Galaxy A7 cell phone.
Translated at DeepL
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