Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences,University
of Wisconsin - Green Bay
For the most part, we have treated structures as thin planes.However, rock units can be quite thick, and their contacts maynot be parallel to one another.
Thick rock bodies are easy to analyze. We simply plot thestructure contours for each contact and find the intersection ofeach contact with the topography.
1. Plot the outcrop pattern of the layer whose top and bottom contacts are shown.
2. Construct structure contours for both contacts. Be very careful not to confused!
3. Plot the trace of each contact and color the outcrop area.
4. Non-parallel contacts (in this case an unconformity) can be treated the same way.
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Created
17 March 1999, Last Update 17 March 1999