Geology Of The Old College Formation Along The Fall Zone Of Delaware

This publication formally establishes the Old College Formation, a lithostratigraphic unit located along the Fall Zone of Delaware. It is named for sediments encountered in numerous drill holes on, and adjacent to, the Old College campus of the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. The Old College Formation consists of micaceous, brown to reddish-brown, fine to coarse sand with scattered gravelly sand overlain by sandy silt beds. The Old College Formation has a distinctive suite of abundant heavy minerals including sillimanite, staurolite, and magnetite. Provenance of the sand is local, derived from erosion of Piedmont rocks along and just to the west of the Fall Zone. The unit is the result of alluvial fan deposition on a pediment-like surface extending from the Fall Zone to the adjacent Coastal Plain. The Old College Formation is a surficial unit that overlies Piedmont saprolite, the Cretaceous Potomac Formation, and the Pleistocene Columbia Formation. No fossil data are available for the unit. Stratigraphic and geomorphic positions indicate that it ranges from 500,000 to 1,000,000 years old; slightly younger than the Columbia Formation