Tag Archives: quartz

Sliced thin; time and process recorded in igneous rocks

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This is the second in a series on the geological world under a microscopeThin section of olivine undercrossed nicols showing a kaleidoscope of interference colours

Geologists, it seems, are never satisfied with just looking at rocks from a distance; there is some innate need to wield their pointy geological hammer. Break that rock; give it a good bash! To the uninitiated, this may seem a bit pugilistic, a kind of primal wonton destruction. But a good geo won’t hit rocks just for the hell-of it; a good Geo will be selective. Most of my field assistants and post-graduate candidates needed to be reminded of this. Find something of interest? Before you do anything else, sketch and photograph it; no one will be interested in looking at photos of rubble.

Looking ‘inside’ rocks serves a unique purpose; it allows you to travel back in time, to picture the ancient world, ancient events, outcomes of processes that involve the benign and the brutal, terrifyingly beautiful. Rocks contain memories of all these. And that is why we sometimes break them apart. The optical, or polarizing microscope allows us to unlock these rock memories in a uniquely visual way.  Continue reading

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The Geology of our Kitchen Bench

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Cut and polished gabbro bench

We have installed a new kitchen bench.  The company that imports and installs this kind of thing refers to the stone as ‘Granite’, a term that is used for pretty well anything that is igneous, crystalline and not marble. Continue reading

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From Sand to Stone = Sandstone; A Remarkable Transformation

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This sand will, over a few million years, become sandstone

You are at the beach, by the river, in the garden; you walk through soft sand, squish through mud, pull weeds and sow seed in soil. They’re all soft, squishable, digable.   But throughout the 3400 million years of our Earth’s known sedimentary record, countless millions of times, these same deposits have hardened to rock. Continue reading

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