from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun Lack of conformity; nonconformity.
noun Geology A surface between successive strata representing a missing interval in the geologic record of time, and produced either by an interruption in deposition or by the erosion of depositionally continuous strata followed by renewed deposition.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun In geology, same as unconformability.
noun Non-conformity; incongruity; inconsistency; want of conformity.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun Want of conformity; incongruity; inconsistency.
noun (Geol.) Want of parallelism between strata in contact.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun nonstandard a lack of conformity
noun geology a gap in time in rockstrata, where erosionoccurs while depositionslows or stops
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
un- + conformity
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Examples
Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton the "father" of modern geology observed the classic unconformity
Much of the site displays a spectacular example of a geological unconformity, concordant and discordant coastlines exist, allowing for varied erosional landforms to be created.
A regional mid-Oligocene unconformity, the Marshall Paraconformity, lies within the limestone interval onshore and correlates with hiatuses in at least two, and possibly three, offshore exploration wells and with a temporary lithological change from limestone to quartz sand at a fourth.
From the latitude of Ward Hunt Island south, an older “basement” of interdigitating sea and brackish ice Lyons et al 1971 lies with angular unconformity beneath the interstratified iced firn and lake ice.
So they talk in terms like there is an unconformity in the sea, below which temp is constant and above which it is getting warmer at around half a deg C a century.
mollusque commented on the word unconformity
UNconformITY
April 28, 2008