If you are a South American living in Africa, or a European living in North America, your journey back to your home country is longer today than it was when you migrated across the Atlantic Ocean.
Introduction: What The Rock Is Geology?
This rock is a lava flow erupted from a 3 billion-year-old volcano, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
"You are a geologist? So, you like rocks, right?"
Well, sort of. I like rocks in the same way that I like books. It's not the physical book that excites me, but the stories within their pages. Rocks are the same.
Slice open a rock and you can learn about ancient rivers, oceans, volcanoes, animals, plants, and mountain ranges. In hundreds of millions of years, the Himalayas will have been eroded away; rocks will be the only record that they ever existed!
A fossilized, 2.8 billion-year-old magma chamber. Ben Strome, NW Scotland.
The issue is that rocks are more complicated than books. Rocks are written in a language that we kind-of-but-don't-fully-understand. Entire chapters of a rock's story have been torn out, misprinted, or scribbled over.
Like a forensic scientist decoding a crime scene, my job is to identify and document a rock's fingerprints, and then match them to our suspects: lava flows, ancient sea creatures, and magma chambers.
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