Fault Line - A GeoJournal

  Okay, I know the title doesn't make much sense, since granite is an igneous rock and limestone is sedimentary. But! They are both rocks! So that's a similarity. Mainly I just wanted to make a pun of some sort.  So, I searched for two days, digging through snowy fields and picking rocks out of flowerbeds, and trying to pry open the frozen ground around my apartment, and I got nothing. I found plenty of igneous rocks, tons of igneous rocks in fact, but no sedimentary rock. It was very frustrating, not to mention cold. Finally I gave up on that and curled up on my couch with a hot mug of cocoa, and read through a 1978 report on the geological makeup of the soil and reocks in Eastern Idaho and discovered that there really aren't that many deposits of sedimentary rock around here, but there are several limestone quarries! So I decided to write about limestone for today's geojournal. What tells you that limestone is sedimentary? Honestly, I didn't know that limestone wa

     For my geojournal project this week, I was asked to watch a youtube video of a volcanic eruption. I actually ended up going down a rabbithole and spent a solid hour just watching volcanoes spew smoke and ash and lava into the air. An hour well spent! But I had to choose one specific mountain to focus on, and so I picked Mt. St Helen's, which proved to be the deadliest and most powerful volcanic eruption in US history when the top of the mountain was, essentially, blown off back in 1980. It was a moving thing to watch, and I found myself awe-struck, my face inches from my computer monitor, as I watched a solid granite mountain blow itself up with force exceeding 1500 of the atom bombs thay we dropped on Hiroshima.     I watched some news coverage of the event, and the numbers I kept hearing were staggering. As the hot smoke billowed out of the mountain it melted the water on the mountainside, as well as releasing millions of gallons that were sitting inside earth near the surfa

  This week, I was given the challenge of finding a mineral in my local area and examining it. I spent many hours outside, and found many rocks, though no examples of any pure minerals. I found a lot of basalt, which is (Google tells me) mostly Pyroxene minerals melted together, and a lot of frozen clay, which is apparently made up of "clay minerals." Who woulda thought? But I had an idea which I really liked, and that was to talk about my fiancee's ring.  Because her birthstone is an emerald, she has a ring with a large, emerald in the center. It's quite a lovely ring. Now emerald is not, of course, a mineral in its own right. However! It is a gem version of the mineral Beryl, which is a silicate mineral typically found in Igneous rock deposits worldwide. What really fascinated me was the realization, which hit me when I was looking at her ring, that there must be emeralds in Idaho! We are, after all, a large state with vast lava fields and dormant volcanoes, and the

  Fault Line                                                                                       A Geology Journal      My name is Dustin Jackson. I'm from a little town in Texas called Houston, also known as The Bayou City because for reasons I can't understand they decided to build it on a swamp! Still, that's home, though right now I live in Rexburg, Idaho. I suppose I'm taking this class because I have always been fascinated by our world. I went through the "fascinated by dinosaurs" phase that most kids experience, but my fascination never went away. Thankfully Houston has a world-class museum district, and I could go often to the Houston Museum of Natural Science growing up and wander for hours in the paleontological hall, the gems and minerals hall, the Hall of energy extraction and petroleum science, and the Hall of Malacology. I never realized these halls were all tied together by a common theme (rocks and minerals), all I knew was that I loved learn