Exactly why I don't let my wife bury me in sand at the beach. I'm not sure she'll stop.
Could've been a scene in an Alfred Hitchcock movie
The bigger picture...
Solana Beach, just south of the Cardiff State Beach parking lot. Coast Highway rides to the south often take me by here.
A few steps north of our poor victim, clues as to what's going on. This lowest part of the Eocene Torrey Sandstone (~45 million years old) contains lots of interesting inclusions wherever it's exposed. Here you see many dark rounded iron-rich concretions. Storm waves smashing against the base of the cliff hollowed out 2 larger concretions to form the "eye sockets" above.
You know it's the base of the Torrey Sandstone because it's resting on the easily recognized green mudstone of the older Del Mar Formation. The undulating contact between between these once flat-lying marine sediments tells of subsequent folding — perhaps related to much more recent and ongoing movement on the Rose Canyon Fault just offshore.
Photo from a field trip in April showing buff-colored Torrey Sandstone on dull green Del Mar Formation at Torrey Pines, about 5 mi south of Cardiff. The sandstone was named for these exposures. Another pretty reliable way to recognize the Del Mar — the characteristic fantastic shapes it takes under wave erosion.
Short green seaweed happens to cover the more seaward Del Mar here, but bare Del Mar exposures are also common. Probably depends a lot on whether the exposure lies above or below mean water level..
Here, the base of the sandstone includes many casts of fossil logs indicating a near-shore environment at the time. The hand belongs to the San Diego State geologist who led the field trip.
