Bliss Formation
geological formation in the southern United States
The Bliss Formation is a geologic formation that is exposed in southern New Mexico, west Texas, and southeastern Arizona. It preserves fossils dating back to the late Cambrian to early Ordovician periods.
Description
The formation consists of ledge-forming brown to maroon medium- to coarse-grained sandstone; thinner beds of very fine-grained glauconitic sandstone; and fine-grained sandstone interbedded with limestone or dolomite. A conglomerate bed is often present at the base and there are rare beds of oolitic ironstone. The formation lies unconformably on Precambrian basement rock except in the Florida Mountains, where it overlies Cambrian syenite and granite. The formation fills paleovalleys in the basement rock, and in some locations (such as the central Franklin Mountains and the west-central Florida Mountains) it is absent. It grades into the overlying El Paso Formation, with the contact placed either at the top of uppermost red or brown sandstone bed of the Bliss Formation or the base of the carbonate cliff characteristic of the El Paso Formation.
The formation straddles the Cambrian-Ordovician boundary, with the lower beds containing fossils of Trempealeauan age and the upper beds containing fossils of Skullrockian age.
The formation is interpreted as marine sediments deposited on a passive continental margin during a marine transgression advancing to the northeast.
Fossils
The formation is locally bioturbated and contains fossils of the brachiopods Obolus, Lingulella, and Lingulepis acuminata.
“Bliss Formation” enters the record as geological formation in the southern United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bliss, Formation and geological can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bliss Formation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.