Geology, Not So Casually Done

Professional schist-poster! Any thin sections I post, I've made. Ask me anything!

[funny-tik-toks]

[ragsy]

Added an S tier new term to my lexicon today. What's up, my siliceous oozes

[gallusrostromegalus]

#When eating an ooze that’s siliceous #I found that it wasn’t delicious. #Though seafood is great #The ooze on my plate #Is mud - and that’s not nutritious! Thank you @owl--feathers for this lovely limerick that taught me how 'Siliceous' is pronounced!

[el-ffej]

The Periodic Table, tl;dr Edition

[gorgeousgeology]

To those who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas and those who don't Happy Holidays.

Wishing you all the best for 2026, may it be fruitful and prosperous.

[schisto-city]

Andesite host rock with calcite vein. Clasts of the host rock are present within the vein. 40X magnification, XPL.

[memorycycle]

now all the ladys on the floor start eroding ! *a harsh wind envelopes the club*

[ruingaraf]

[themarchrabbit]

Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.

Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.

This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.

SCIENCE

[ruingaraf]

thank you

this is one of the best comments this post has recieved

[tyrror]

I have witnessed:

Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”

Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”

A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”

Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.

Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”

Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.

A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.

I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…

[gessorly]

Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.

[thepioden]

- I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”

- Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night. 

- A whole swarm of older women - and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs - all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.

- At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road. 

- “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”

- Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it. 

[onsheka]

a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work

“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”

[themarchrabbit]

The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”

I then let her into her office.

[shelomit]

“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.

Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.

[amuseoffyre]

One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.

[roachpatrol]

every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds

[kaijuno]

- Two professors and some TAs playing hockey and the puck was dry ice and the sicks were very expensive measuring devices.

- The phrase “Do not climb on the telescope you assholes” embroidered and hung in the observatory because of an ‘incident’.

- Geology professor has this nifty skill of being able to tell rock types by licking them.

- We managed to fit an entire student into a weather balloon once.

- Had a professor give me pointers on how to sneak into a bar.

[the-haiku-bot]

- Had a professor

give me pointers on how to

sneak into a bar.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[official-olm-posts]

science, everybody!

we were once tasked to create a chemical reaction and then set the fumes alight in my sophomore chemistry class. she did not tell us that lighting oxygen is FUCKING LOUD.

[lithuvia]

On a field lab we were taking a tour of the local geologic features, and our professor stopped us at a lookout and pointed across the valley at the highway and it’s roadcut. Apparently it used to be a superfund environmental remediation site, on account of hidden pyrite deposits in the hillside creating massive amounts of acid mine drainage when they blasted it open. She introduced it as “That huge fucking mess”.

Had another field lab where we were all going out to profile a stream, and our professor was really hyping up a piece of depth-finding equipment we would get to use. The words “on loan from NASA” were tossed around. It ended up being a rock tied to a hammer with a very long length of twine.

In contrast with the above, had another field lab where we were taking measurements with a gravimeter, and the professor only told is how much it was worth (50k) after we had hauled it out of the trunk of his car and lugged it up the hill.

Had a professor bring an entire whiteboard on a 2 hour hike so he could plunk it down and lecture us at each stop we were taking notes at.

Finally, was talking with a professor before class, and this guy’s office was a complete disaster. Papers all over the floor. At the end of our talk, right before class, he rolls his chair back, squints at one of the papers his chair had been on, and proceeds to teach an entire geophysics lecture based on the half-sheet of notes he snatched off the floor.

[terrible-tentacle-theatre]

Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad

[bears-official]

lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)

[terrible-tentacle-theatre]

Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around

[thepioden]

Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram

[thepurplegeologist]

in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine. 

[laboradorescence]

i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft

[ancientorigins]

Dragon Eye, a metamorphic rock formation, was found in a stone mine in Lancashire, England.

[unfunyman]

[pukicho]

what is your favorite rock shape

roud

[schisto-city]

Teeny Weeny Calcite Crystals

[schisto-city]

Can I offer you all a nice rock in this trying time?

Schistose Limestone, XPL, 50x magnification

[eebie]

girls love him for his poor posture and pathetic demeanor

[totallynormalmountain]

geologists talking about shield volcanoes

[eebie]

i love you. this post is only about shield volcanoes 🌋 now. everyone else fuck of❌

[schisto-city]

[verybadpaleontologyjokes]

happy palentines day, geology edition

bonus

paleontology ones

[schisto-city]

An opaque matrix usually makes for a pretty boring and uninformative thin section, unless you can polish it! This is a reflected light view of a partially metamorphosed iron sandstone. I love the way you can see the grains shifting!

[schisto-city]

An opaque matrix usually makes for a pretty boring and uninformative thin section, unless you can polish it! This is a reflected light view of a partially metamorphosed iron sandstone. I love the way you can see the grains shifting!