Description
The Hamilton Group consists of the Mahantango Formation, a dark gray, gray, brown, and olive laminated shale, siltstone, and very fine-grained sandstone or claystone containing marine fossils, overlying the Marcellus Shale, a fissile gray-black to black, thinly laminated, pyritic, carbonaceous thin shale with sparse marine fauna and siderite concretions. The total thickness of the Hamilton Group in Pennsylvania runs approximately 970 feet. In New York State, it thickens from 250 feet near Lake Erie to over 2,500 feet in Ulster and Greene counties, with depths ranging from outcrops to 8,000 feet below the surface of Sullivan County, in the southeastern part of the state.
In the interior lowlands of New York, the Hamilton Group contains the Marcellus, Skaneateles, Ludlowville, and Moscow Formations, in ascending order, with the Tully Limestone above. These units are divided by the Stafford, Centerfield, and Tichenor limestones. In Ontario, Canada, the Hamilton Group formations are, in ascending order, Bell, Rockport Quarry, Arkona, Hungry Hollow, Widder and Ipperwash; the Kettle Point Formation lies unconformably above.
The Mahantango Formation includes the following members, in descending order: Tully argillaceous limestone, Sherman Ridge, Montebello sandstone, Fisher Ridge, Dalmatia, and Turkey Ridge. In south-central Pennsylvania, it includes Clearville, Frame, Chaneysville, and Gander Run Members. Its thickness in Maryland ranges from 600 feet in the west, increasing to 1,200 feet in the east, and approximately 1000 feet thick in central Pennsylvania.
The Marcellus Formation contains a local limestone Purcell Member and Tioga bentonite at the base in eastern Pennsylvania. Its thickness in Maryland ranges from 250 feet in east, increasing to 500 feet in the west, but is only approximately 70 feet thick in central Pennsylvania.
The Hamilton Group, Tioga Metabentonite Bed, and Needmore Shale formerly were designated as the Romney Formation.
Read more about this topic: Hamilton Group
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, and that Missionaries of that description from [France] would avail more than those who should endeavor to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)