Blue goo
soil type
Blue goo is a sticky, plasticky, blueish-grey, clay-textured soil derived from a highly weathered serpentinite mélange. The name derives from the soil's color; a result of undergoing anaerobic conditions and becoming gleyed. A greyer variation is called "grey goo". Blue goo is primarily found along the Northern California coast.
Parent material
The Franciscan Complex is the bedrock from which blue goo is derived. It stretches along the coastline from Central California up to Southern Oregon and contains sheared materials from both the Pacific and North American Plates that have accumulated in the accretionary wedge.
The rock types that produce blue goo include: greenstones, cherts, basalts, shales, sandstones, schists, and serpenitites. These materials mixed together forming a "plum pudding" or a mélange. This mélange decomposed through weathering to form blue goo.
Common features
Clay soils like blue goo have the highest water-holding capacity when compared with other soils, giving them a low draining capacity.
“Blue goo” enters the record as soil type. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Blue, soil and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue goo” 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.