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The Bimini Road

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Shelly Gauthier
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« on: December 26, 2011, 02:40:03 pm »

Geological explanation

The consensus among conventional geologists and archaeologists is that the Bimini Road is a natural feature composed of beachrock that orthogonal and other joints have broken up into rectangular, subrectangular, polygonal, and irregular blocks. The geologists and anthropologists who have personally studied the Bimini Road include Eugene Shinn[6][22] of the U.S. Geological Survey; Marshall McKusick.[5][23] an Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Iowa; W. Harrison[24] of Environmental Research Associates, Virginia, Beach Virginia; Mahlon M. Ball and J. A. Gifford[4][25] of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami; and Eric Davaud[10] and A. Strasser[11] of the Department of Geology and Paleontology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. After either inspecting or studying the Bimini Road, they all concluded that it consists of naturally jointed beachrock. John A. Gifford, a professional geologist, spent a significant time studying the geology of the Bimini Islands for his University of Miami Master's thesis[26] about the geology of the Bimini Islands. Calvert and others[8] identified the samples that they dated from the Bimini Wall as being natural beachrock.

Detailed studies by E. Davaud and A. Strasser[10][11] of Holocene limestones currently exposed on North Bimini and Joulter Cays (Bahamas) reveal the sequence of events likely responsible for creating beachrock pavements like the Bimini Road. First, a complete beach sequence of shallow subtidal, intertidal, and supratidal carbonate sediments accumulated as the shoreline of North Bimini built seaward during part of the Holocene. Once the deposition of these sediments built the North Bimini's shoreline seaward, freshwater cementation of the carbonate occurred at some depth, possibly even a meter or so below sea level, beneath the island's surface. This cementation created a band consisting of a thick primary layer of semilithified sediments and thinner discontinuous lenses and layers of similar semilithified sediments beneath it. Later, when erosion of the island's shoreline occurred, the band of semilithifed sediment was exposed within the intertidal zone and the semilithified sediments were cemented into beachrock. As the sediments underlying the eroding shoreline was eroded down to Pleistocene limestone, the beachrock broke into flat-lying, tabular, and rectangular, subrectangular, polygonal, and irregular blocks as observed for modern beaches within the Bahamas by E. Davaud and A. Strasser.[10][11] Thinner layers of beachrock underlying the primary bed of beachrock were also broken up as the loose sediments enclosing them and the thicker primary bed were eroded. As the loose sediment was scoured out from under the blocks and other pieces of beachrock by so-called "scour and settling processes", they dropped downward for several meters until they rested directly on the erosion-resistant Pleistocene limestone as an erosional lag.[27][28] Eugene Shinn[6] discusses a similar, but not identical, process by which the Bimini Road could have been created.
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