Neat rocks! We've also got some cool columnar stuff around here, a whole bunch of the eastern half of Washington is on columnar flood basalt:
and there's a few really good outcroppings of columnar andesite at Mt Rainier, some of which you can see right from the road:
plus just generally it's an Exciting Geology sort of area on account of the volcanoes and stuff. Also, next quarter I'm taking Geology 101 and I'm super hype.
If that's not devil's postpile I'll eat my hat.
Was going to go there last summer but the traffic at mammoth was insane when I got up there so I went bouldering on the giant pile of obsidian near glass Creek instead and grabbed some samples of obsidian pummice for my collection instead.
Aww man, I love rocks! I just went to a local rock/mineral/fossil/gem show this past weekend, actually.
Unfortunately my college did not offer any geology courses, but I did take geomorphology and I have an entire childhood full of rocks. (Dad was a geology major and used to read me to sleep with Annals of the Former World... I need to read it in full now. Also our house is full of bookshelves that in addition to books are also covered in rocks. Many many rocks.)
I dream of saving up money and time off to go travel to cool geological sites... I get to see road cuts on the way to the mountains (and also mountains) but there's so much more out there! Gonna explore! What are your top sites to visit? :0
Gwenno, excellent photos! I would never have thought of the cakes, though I have done columns in chocolate for a geologist friend's party.
One other really cool site around here that I was just reminded of is Ape Cave, it's a lava tube from St Helens and it's fairly big in diameter (the only places where you have to even consider the concept of hitting your head are where the ex-ceiling is sitting in a pile on the floor that almost reaches the new roof) and a couple miles long. Generally the St Helens area has a lot of really really neat geology (lahar detritus, anyone?) but that's a particular star.
My parents were actually within the vicinity when Mt St Helens erupted last time! We have a little container filled with volcanic ash back home, and some photos of the eruption so I guess it's little wonder I ended up taking an interest in geology :P Sadly, I've never been up close in person, but I'd love to see Ape Cave and Mt St Helens for myself one day :)
Hahah, technically I didn't think of the cakes either. When I was in my final year at university, there was a nationwide geology baking competition with prompts such as "hatching dinosaurs", "columnar jointing", and "unconformity" which inspired me to give these a shot. I ended up getting third place, which was pretty cool, and my friends were happy to help me with all the cake afterwards which was even nicer :D
My parents were actually within the vicinity when Mt St Helens erupted last time! We have a little container filled with volcanic ash back home, and some photos of the eruption so I guess it's little wonder I ended up taking an interest in geology :P Sadly, I've never been up close in person, but I'd love to see Ape Cave and Mt St Helens for myself one day :)
Gwenno, excellent photos! I would never have thought of the cakes, though I have done columns in chocolate for a geologist friend's party.
One other really cool site around here that I was just reminded of is Ape Cave, it's a lava tube from St Helens and it's fairly big in diameter (the only places where you have to even consider the concept of hitting your head are where the ex-ceiling is sitting in a pile on the floor that almost reaches the new roof) and a couple miles long. Generally the St Helens area has a lot of really really neat geology (lahar detritus, anyone?) but that's a particular star.
And the Mojave ooh! What were you looking at there? The biological crusts are fascinating. Did you get to Kelso or Hole in the Wall? A lot of that country reminds me of Central Australia.
Growing up around rocks must be neat.
I basically grew up and live on a sandbar. (Yes, yes, technically it's all moraine, but it's a sandbar)
It's fun.... Except when it moves unexpectedly.
Yes, but sand is just rocks... but small. Get a nice hand lens and you'll never be bored again ;)
That's a big mood, I had no idea other people didn't do earthquake drills in class till i moved overseas.
We do em here in school too. And there's some big one on a specific day that a bunch of businesses in the city agree on to raise awareness? not sure about that one though
No earthquake drills out by me.
The first time I ever felt an earthquake was a 5.0 aftershock of the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor (aka the Rattle of the Bay) when I was in Monterey, California. (For the main quake my ex and I were driving north from Santa Barbara towards San Francisco and we didn't find out about it until an hour or two later).
Also there are apparently whale fossils up there??
So I posted about it in the general discussion thread already but I foundoff in the woods near a site that someone tried to use nukes to frac for oil and gas.Spoiler: this • show
Pretty sure it's silica carbide (no idea how it even got there and it's unlikely it formed there, if anything I'd expect trinitite from that kind of experiment) but the guy at work who went to school to study geology has been on a fire assignment for two weeks now, and hasn't had a chance to take a look at it yet.
Oooh, a mystery! Wish I was there to get my hands on it. You should update us when your coworker gets a look at it!
Vulpes, wow!! Those are some cool rocks! I like the tiny garnets even if they're not gem-quality. The blood-red (or wine-red?) colour... nice.
The limestone? Ummm... I don't know much about rocks but if it were bigger it'd make for a nice slide. Very climbable. Is it the waves along the beach you got them from that carved the shape out?
Ooh, wow, these rocks are really cool! I'm not a geologist but I find it really interesting to notice how the type of rocks in an area have such big effects on the landscape and the ecology - for example, limestone ridges have a very different shape and ecosystem to granite-based hills, and you can really see how different a coastline made up of sedimentary rock like limestone looks and behaves from a coastline made up of igneous or metamorphous rock - limestone makes the coast all pitted and rough with cliffs and overhangs and weird little coves, whereas with harder, volcanic rock you get smoother curves with headlands jutting out and massive boulders and curving slopes of rock slowly shaped by the sea.
This is a piece of schist (haha) full of finger-tip sized garnets.
(How did you get a geology geek friend, Vulpes? I really want one of those. Is there a catalog?)
”Not fair! not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in it's nassty little pocketsess?” O_O
Róisín and Vulpes, if you guys put some string in your pockets, between everything else you'll have just about what you'll need to make a shambles (http://"http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Shamble")! :D Particularly with the scrying stone, Róisín, I feel like that would create some sort of resonant insight-amplifying effect or something.
Your link will work better without the quotation marks, so: shambles (http://http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Shamble). I've not got into the Discworld books, so this was really interesting. Until I got the link to work, I thought you were describing the sort of thing I often construct, of bits and bobs that I have lying around, held together with stray bits of string, which could indeed be described as a complete shambles (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/shambles)!
Speaking of the volcano, you can now buy it!
Róisín is totally a Discworldian witch! This is now real life canon!