Orcombe Point

Geographical location

Orcombe Point is a headland near Exmouth on the south coast of England in the county of Devon. It separates the broad estuary of the Exe to the west of the Sandy Bay in the east.

The cliffs of the English Channel in East Devon and Dorset is one of the natural wonders of the world. From Orcombe Point to Old Harry Rocks extends a 155 km long coastline, which has been declared as the first landscape in England by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Orcombe point here is the starting point of the "walk through time", a hiking trail, which follows the entire Jurassic Coast. There the Geoneedle, a kind of pillar is in pyramid shape in the surface selected samples of various rocks of the Jurassic Coast are incorporated. The "Geo - needle " was unveiled to commemorate the World Heritage Site on October 3, 2002 by Prince Charles.

The rock strata of the Jurassic Coast are tilted slightly to the east. The geologically oldest rocks are therefore located in the westernmost section of this Küstengeotops. To the east, the median age of the rocks decreases gradually. The natural outcrops along the coast form a substantially continuous sequence, ranging from the Triassic deposits, on the Jurassic to those of the Cretaceous geological period and represents a total of about 185 million years ago. The depositional area, who recorded the sedimentary series of the Jurassic Coast at the time, is the so-called Wessex Basin.

The red rocks on the cliff at Orcombe Point consist of layers which are lithostratigraphically as " Exmouth Mudstone and Sandstone Formation " means ( roughly translatable as " Exmouth clay and sandstone formation " ), and in turn to " Aylesbeare Mudstone group "( " Alyesbeare - mudstone group ") include. The Exmouth formation consists of reddish brown silty mudstones, in which lenses are switched from red-brown sandstone that were deposited in the Late Permian and / or in the early Triassic in a flood plain under semi-arid to semi-humid climatic conditions. This is the Exmouth lineup also their age and petrography closely related to some significant Permian and Triassic sedimentary series in Central Europe, for example, both in terms of its emergence as with the Tambach formation of the Thuringian Forest, or the widespread in Germany sandstone.

The sequence in the cliff of Orcombe Point is part of the type - profile of the Exmouth lineup.

Cliff at Orcombe Points ( the so-called Orcombe Rocks ) facing east, on the Sandy Bay to Straight Point ( on the horizon ).

622939
de