Armadale slate quarry, Armadale Shire, Western Australia, Australia
Latitude & Longitude (WGS84): | 32° 9' 26'' South , 116° 1' 11'' East |
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Latitude & Longitude (decimal): | -32.15734,116.01970 |
GeoHash: | G#: qd6901fvz |
Locality type: | Quarry |
KΓΆppen climate type: | Csa : Hot-summer Mediterranean climate |
Located 1.6 km south east of Armadale. The quarry is located off the South Western Highway, along Marsh Road.
The quarry is 200 metres long by 90 metres wide covering 1.8Ha. It is sited on the Darling Scarp, which forms the western edge of the Yilgarn Craton.
The quarry was mined for brick clay between 1902 and 1930 producing
150 000 bricks per week. It was purchased by the City of Armadale in 1995 as an education geology resource.
The rocks seen in the quarry are from the Cardup Group, their formation poorly understood, but are thought to predate the Yilgarn Craton granite gneiss rocks. The Cardup Group is composed of three units. Lowermost is the Whitby Sandstone of quartz rich sandstone beds overlain by silty shale, in turn overlain by thinly bedded black and white shale. The sandtone contains stratomalitic structures. Above this is the Nerrigen Formation 20 metres of pale coloured sandstone and shale. The upper unit is called the Armadale Shale of black-grey to black shale grading to cream coloured and white shale. The quarry also contains dolerite intrusives.
The northern portion of the quarry shows the shale, while the southern portion the sandstone. The reference cites secondary green rocks in the quarry indicating the presence of copper in the shale, but makes no mention of lead minerals already listed against the locality.
The quarry is closed to the public and fenced. It is considered unstable, a tunnel in the quarry flooded, and stromatolites which could once be seen have been damaged over time and not easily discernable.
Commodity List
This is a list of exploitable or exploited mineral commodities recorded at this locality.Mineral List
5 valid minerals.
Rock Types Recorded
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Alphabetical List Tree DiagramRegional Geology
This geological map and associated information on rock units at or nearby to the coordinates given for this locality is based on relatively small scale geological maps provided by various national Geological Surveys. This does not necessarily represent the complete geology at this locality but it gives a background for the region in which it is found.
Click on geological units on the map for more information. Click here to view full-screen map on Macrostrat.org
Neoproterozoic 541 - 1000 Ma ID: 731050 | Cardup Group Age: Neoproterozoic (541 - 1000 Ma) Stratigraphic Name: Cardup Group Description: Shale, conglomerate, quartzite, sandstone Comments: argillaceous detrital sediment; sedimentary siliciclastic; synthesis of multiple published descriptions Lithology: Argillaceous detrital sediment; sedimentary siliciclastic Reference: Raymond, O.L., Liu, S., Gallagher, R., Zhang, W., Highet, L.M. Surface Geology of Australia 1:1 million scale dataset 2012 edition. Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia). [5] |
Neoarchean - Mesoarchean 2500 - 3200 Ma ID: 3189638 | Archean crystalline metamorphic rocks Age: Archean (2500 - 3200 Ma) Comments: Yilgarn Craton Lithology: Amphibolite/granulite grade orthogneiss Reference: Chorlton, L.B. Generalized geology of the world: bedrock domains and major faults in GIS format: a small-scale world geology map with an extended geological attribute database. doi: 10.4095/223767. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 5529. [154] |
Data and map coding provided by Macrostrat.org, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
Armadale slate quarry, Armadale Shire, Western Australia, Australia