The reef had several "splits" that ran across its whole length. These were white in colour and, I think, were composed of quartz. Interestingly, these splits ran straight through both the substrate and the rocks as if someone sliced the reef with a laser.

I would like to know how these formed. I imagine high pressures and shear forces were at play but I still don't understand how it's possible that the splits don't go around the rocks (at least the smaller ones) but straight through. Especially if I assume the rocks are harder than the substrate. But that might not be the case?

See the photo captions for more details.

Sorry, for not calling things by their proper names. I'm no geologist so this questions doubles as an identification one. I guess.

View of the rock with one of the splits going across vertically roughly in the middle:

Wider view of the same split with a person's legs for scale. The split continues behind:

One of the small rocks being split in half by a narrow split. My finger on the left for scale:

Overall view of the reef showing a structure of plates laid on each other:

Here are some more details:

Does this also belong to the fossil?

There was a clear path the water from there was taking that produced the drip over the surface:

And finally, I noticed some largish rocks pushed off to the side of the road. They look like this:

I noticed that the rocks near the water path up top look a lot like these, and these look a lot like random pictures of travertine that I've been Googling for.

So based on this, I'm going to make the educated guess that I'm looking at travertine that's deposited on the surface of the rock. I don't think there are any nearby hot springs, but maybe this is simply water flowing through the limestone in the rock above, dissolving the minerals, and slowly depositing them on the surface?

_{I see that questions of the form "identify this rock" are off-topic here, and I'm not sure if this counts. If so, let me know where else I should ask this.}

This annotated image shows the night sky at ESO's Paranal Observatory around twilight, about 90 minutes before sunrise. The blue lines mark degrees of elevation above the horizon.

A new ESO study looking into the impact of satellite constellations on astronomical observations shows that up to about 100 satellites could be bright enough to be visible with the naked eye during twilight hours (magnitude 5–6 or brighter). The vast majority of these, their locations marked with small green circles in the image, would be low in the sky, below about 30 degrees elevation, and/or would be rather faint. Only a few satellites, their locations marked in red, would be above 30 degrees of the horizon — the part of the sky where most astronomical observations take place — and be relatively bright (magnitude of about 3–4). For comparison, Polaris, the North Star, has a magnitude of 2, which is 2.5 times brighter than an object of magnitude 3.

The number of visible satellites plummets towards the middle of the night when more satellites fall into the shadow of the Earth, represented by the dark area on the left of the image. Satellites within the Earth's shadow are invisible.

Crediti: ESO/Y. Beletsky/L. Calçada