It was a tuesday morning, and mama said to me that I’m going to accompany her to Pasir Puteh, Kelantan. No need to story how I manage to get to Kelantan, but I stayed there for a week.

There was this bright day, I went to Jeram Pasu waterfall which located at Padang Pak Amat. I went there because I felt so boring and I want to go for a refresh, but grandma forbid me because I was alone. Therefore, I just took a walk around.

Being a geology student, I tried to study about the waterfall outcrop, briefly. I had done no homework about this place, so I had no idea where to start.

Amazingly, the soil around the area is reddish and has a laterite based features. Perhaps it contained high percentage of hematite or iron oxides. The feature from nearby quarry represents the structure of the soil and I can simply assume that the whole mountain around the waterfall are having look-alike feature. Does this meant that the mountain (hill) is still new? They are hardly in hard rock form, and mostly brittle and  fragile.

However, the waterfall itself is made of hard rock structure, of course. Because, without hard rock, the place will collapse within years or days and there won’t be such place called ‘waterfall’ over here. The rocks which build up the waterfall were highly based of quartz. There were joints and fractures all over the place.

The hand specimen elaboration:

1. Physical structure:
   Smoky or milky quartz, fine grain boulders within conglomerate of quartz pebbles, sandy river, low sphericity grain, poor quartz crystals
2. Grain size: 3mm to 10mm
3. The weathered rock turns white, or very light grey, near white.

Assumption:

There was time, where the high quartzite rocks were available, maybe from sandstone metamorphosed and later broken into pieces by a high energy mechanism, and transported them to be deposited again as conglomerate rock. The fine grain boulders within the conglomerate perhaps originated nearby or on top of the high quartz structure and later deposited together within the conglomerate. The weathered sand around the waterfall showed coarse grains of quartz.

According to MyMalaysia.net.my, the sedimentations in Kelantan are typically shallow marine environment and have connections with inter-mittent volcanism which appear to have continued from Carboniferous through the Permian to the Triassic and said to have an unconformity between the Trias and Permian.

The Upper Triassic orogeny which was also accompanied by granitic intrusions brought an end to marine sedimentation in the Peninsula.

- MyMalaysia.net.my

The photo portraits the waterfall after a rain. (courtesy of Asia Explorers)

To read more about Kelantan, you can visit the links below.

Sources:

• MyMalaysia.net.my
• AsiaExplorers.com
• JungleWalla.com