Iberville Shale

These remind me of icebergs.

Iberville shale

The flat, dark gray stones streaked with unmistakable white lines on the shores of Lake Champlain are Iberville shale – a name that comes from the Quebec town where the shale was discovered by Western geologists. It’s a thinly layered, sedimentary rock that was formed from marine silt deposited roughly 500 to 440 million years ago. Iberville Shale was created during the Ordovician period, when almost all of the earth north of the tropics was ocean. The silt deposited deep in these ocean waters became shale as it hardened and compacted over time. It’s younger than most other sedimentary rocks in the Champlain Valley, which date back 600-500 million years. The tell-tale white stripes are veins of mineral calcite formed by powerful compressing forces that drove calcium carbonate in the water to coalesce into mineral calcite.

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