A monocline is a step-like fold in rock strata consisting of a zone of steeper dip within an otherwise horizontal or gently-dipping sequence. Wikipedia

“Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it — it’s amazing.” tagline in ad for Vilnius, Lithuania.

My Utah is all about the landscape and the geology that has made that landscape. Sure, there are Indian ruins and petroglyphs and lots of fossils, but it is the land that draws me, over and over again, to Southeastern Utah. For close to half a billion years, this part of the world was, off and on, underwater. Half a billion years is a long time, and, during that time, material washed down from the nearby mountains in different ways and at different times. Part of that time, this area was at the edge of a supercontinent, Pangea, which reached from the Antarctic to the equator, and part of that time, this area was at the bottom of a shallow sea that divided the North American proto-continent. By 70 million years ago, these thousands of different layers settled underwater, horizontally, about 10,000 feet deep. Then, as Pangea was breaking up, the Farallon Plate very slowly rammed – rammed can’t be the right word for something that is only moving inches a year, but what is? – into the North American Plate and, because underwater plates are heavier, the Farallon plate started to slide under the North American Plate.

As the Farallon Plate slid under the North American Plate, it raised the Sierras and the Rockies along with the Colorado Plateau, exposing them to erosion. For reasons I need to fully understand, unlike the Sierras and the Rockies, this area of thousands of layers of sentiment was raised almost level resulting in the different layers, now thousands of feet above sea level, still roughly horizontal. This nearly level area is composed of layers of varying hardness. Millions of years of erosion have washed away the soft layers on top until the hard layers were exposed, forming large flat mesas with steep drops into canyons or, at the eroding edges, down to the next hard layer.

As if that were not enough drama, deep below these layers, accumulating under water, were vertical faults caused by various compressional forces. Above the faults, the layers were vertically displaced. In the Waterpocket Fold’s case, this movement along the fault caused the west side to shift upwards by more than 7.000 feet compared to the the east side. The overlying sedimentary layers were draped above the fault and formed a monocline.

We drove north from Bullfrog along a long cliff formed by this monocline and then turned west to go through it on our way to Boulder, Utah.

I can’t imagine any place more different from Utah than Lithuania, but it sure looks like an interesting place to visit.