A little bit of landscape evolution

The perched boulder after the storm -- October 2018

The perched boulder 2 months later -- December 2018.  We have had a lot of rain, and 

it has come crashing down..... 

In October 2018, following a large gale that brought down a tree at the end of our garden, I did a post on the rapid transformation of the landscape.  The thing that interested me most was the manner in which the rootstock of the falling tree had lifted up a large boulder to a position where it was about 2m above the ground surface.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/10/another-biological-process-explains.html

Now, after two months of very wet weather -- including a number of deluges -- the boulder has slumped down from its pedestal and is resting on the ground surface again.  Another interesting thing is that some of the soil from the rootstock has also washed down, and is resting on the old ground surface.  In years to come, this means there is an inversion of the stratigraphy, with older deposits resting on top of newer ones.

This sport of inversion occurs with landslides and avalanches, on a large scale, and with minor slope failure events on a small scale.  So the message is this -- we can interpret most stratigraphic sequences in straightforward terms (top layers younger, lower layers older) but maybe we should not be too surprised when every now and then we encounter something anomalous.......