#rock nerdery

[yesfuzzydragons]

Prof only gave us a quarter of a page to talk about isostasy and how it relates to mountain building. Fuck that, it takes longer than that just to define isostasy.

[yesfuzzydragons]

The weird ass piece of obsidian did not make an appearance. However that is the most gigantic boulder of pumice I have ever seen and it threw me badly for a few minutes. Fortunately my old friends anthracite and slate were among the rock samples, so at least I could be confident about those.

That was evil, throwing that piece of fossiliferous black shale at us though. There was supposedly a fossil in it. I think it's been all but eroded away from decades of geology students handling it though. I put that it was a plant fossil. To be honest, I really didn't see anything at all.

The only way I recognized the diorite was because the professor had a foam replica of a boulder of the stuff and was fond of throwing it at people, making them nearly piss themselves when they saw what for all the world looked like a 30 pound missile of solid rock aimed straight for their head.

[yesfuzzydragons]

My geology professor keeps hinting that he will give an automatic A to anyone who buys him a Julian apple pie on our field trip next week. You don't understand. Julian apple pies are made of awesomeness and rainbows. Julian apples grow in soil made from Julian Schist, which is awesome rock.

Julian is a historic gold mining town in the mountains east of San Diego. It's just about the oldest thing here, save for the Native American sites. During the fire storms of 2003, other more modern structures were sacrificed to the flames so that all firefighting efforts could be focused on saving Julian. It worked, and so we get to tour an old gold mine on Saturday and I get to be happily underneath a mountain while outside temperatures will probably get to about 30 C.

[yesfuzzydragons]

Argh, geology homework is driving me insane. You would think that having experienced a shit ton of earthquakes in my life would make it easier to describe the different seismic waves produced. Nope. Sometimes it's shaking, sometimes it's rolling, and sometimes it feels like you're bouncing down a flight of stairs. Generally in those situations, I wasn't analyzing too much. I was mostly trying to locate the nearest heavy and/or glass objects and avoiding them, usually by diving under the nearest table or desk. Or just hanging onto something.

During one of them, years ago, by the time I realized it was an earthquake, my sister's 60 lb. Belgian Shepherd had jumped onto my lap, whimpering. Fortunately, nothing fell. It was a rather small earthquake.

By the way, if you ever have the opportunity to try out one of those shake plates at a science museum that simulate earthquakes, they're pretty accurate.