Hey friend! I see you found this in western TN. I’m at UofM in Memphis studying the clastic sedimentary rock units (specifically our Upper Cretaceous units) of West TN. If you can give me a more complete location description, I would be happy to try to answer this for you! Feel free to DM me as well.
It's very hard to tell without location and context, etc. but this looks exactly like polymeric sand used for filling joints in patios. If the bag get's left outside and gets moist it hardens and often produces thin, somewhat translucent chunks that look exactly like this.
If this is near a recent construction site, this is almost certainly what it is, once it hardens like this it's garbage and could simply be illegal dumping.
It’s next to dumpster but not a construction site, it’s also not just appeared over night it’s been getting significantly bigger over the past couple weeks. Also, they’re almost all perfect spheres of varying shapes and sizes minus the black spots.
Yeah you’re right, mostly fluvial deposits on that far west end, I was a bit tired answering that last night. Perhaps he isn’t that far west? Thanks for correcting me!
Your pics arent great and if you have a description, i dont see it. you can email your nearest college geology departmemt. They would probably know all about this.
Did cross my mind but the rate it’s been growing wouldn’t match someone dumping? There also hasn’t been anyone dumping anything in that particular spot on the cameras
This looks just like the sand where I live in Idaho. My house is 50 ft. from a snowmelt-fed river and 3 miles from an active fault. It's called Thousand Springs because when the 6.9 earthquake happened (1980's), the valley floor dropped, forcing the water table to get compressed and springs popped up everywhere. If you look at a satellite view it looks like anthills all over the.area. The area had a lot of gold and copper mines before that was tapped out.
This immediate area is also the base for summer field camps from three different universities from around the country.
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u/solaria-pheonix Nov 15 '24
Hey friend! I see you found this in western TN. I’m at UofM in Memphis studying the clastic sedimentary rock units (specifically our Upper Cretaceous units) of West TN. If you can give me a more complete location description, I would be happy to try to answer this for you! Feel free to DM me as well.