Cleavage and folds

Cleavage often goes hand in hand with folding. You can find out more about the different sorts of cleavage elsewhere [link to go in later]. However, the neat thing about cleavage is that in ideal cases its orientation is parallel to the axial surface of local folds - when it is refered to as "axial planar cleavage". In this ideal situation, and even if it fans a bit, the intersection of cleavage planes with the bedding planes (the intersection of two planes is a line of course) will be parallel to the hinge line of the fold. You can study these relationships by clicking here. Cleavage-bedding relationships can also be used to help unravel large-scale structure using the vergence concept.

Return to menu

Learning structure home page