Goodloe's Gravel Pit

The Goodloe Gravel Pit is located five miles east of Fredericksburg, Virginia and close to the banks of the present course of the Rappahannock River. The pit is an exposure of unconsolidated river terrace deposits that are believed to be up to 100,000 years old. The sediments range in size from silts to large boulders. The rock clasts found in the Goodloe pit represent igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary source locations well to the west, in Virginia's Piedmont and Blue Ridge provinces. Students from the sedimentation and stratigraphy class, as well as summer Geology 112 students, routinely visit the pit in order to decipher the sedimentary structures and reconstruct the depositional environment.

The Goodloe pit is well known for its excellent exposures of cross bedding and repeated intervals of graded beds. The sediments record the changes in depositional environment that have occurred throughout the last several tens of thousands of years.

The recent drought in Virginia aided in the formation of these mud cracks on the floor of the gravel pit.

In the photo below, a Geology 112 student is trying to remove a distinctive looking cobble-size rock fragment from the wall of the pit. Often the clasts are unique enough in their appearance and mineralogy so that it is possible to identify the likely source location from which the rock originated.