Geology Rocks

furtherlightandtruth:

Check out this river.

I love the glow of the silt, sediment and minerals that flow together in this alluvial confluence of colors. I wish I lived by a some natural body of water, but fortunately there is a pool on post. Cool enough, but not nearly as pretty :-P

furtherlightandtruth:

Check out this river.

I love the glow of the silt, sediment and minerals that flow together in this alluvial confluence of colors. I wish I lived by a some natural body of water, but fortunately there is a pool on post. Cool enough, but not nearly as pretty :-P

dewdropzgarden:

queen tourmaline on quartz

(via artschoolscans)

suzannamphotography:

purple

amandaraewashere:

I’m sitting in a coffeeshop in Sedona, minding my own business and furiously click-clacking away on my laptop, when an older guy sits down at the table to split a bran muffin with his wife. When I pause to look up, he turns to me.

“Are you writing a book?” he asks.

 “Not right this minute,” I reply, sort of caught off guard, “but maybe soon.”

“About your travels?”

“Yeah, actually. How can you tell?”

We talked about the Grand Canyon for a moment, and then I went back to my work.

Twenty minutes later, the couple gets up to leave, and the guy places this napkin on my keyboard.

“Enjoy Arizona,” he said. “It’s a special place.”

[Sedona, Arizona, January 22, 2012]

I’m no rocket scientist, but I am a rock scientist, and that dude had to be a rock nerd.

geologise:

Extreme Geology: The Giant’s Causeway, Ireland and Staffa, Scotland
→ Credit for photos: one, two, and three.

These amazing basalt columns cane be found on Staffa, Scotland, and Giant’s Causeway in Nothern Ireland. These geological structures formed from volcanic activity over 50 mya where the slow cooling of basalt creates the hexagonal columns you see today. The process which creates such stunning hexagonal columns is called “columnar jointing”; a process where the basalt rapidly cools from the outside towards the centre, causing it to contract and form these structures.

seascapesndaydreams:

barite

alchymista:

Big Tokyo Earthquake Likely within the Next Few Years

A big earthquake is much more likely to hit the Japanese capital, Tokyo, in the next few years than the government has predicted, researchers say.

The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude 7 quake would strike the region in the next four years, while the government states that the chances of such an event are 70% in the next 30 years.

The warning comes less than a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan’s north-eastern coast. Yet, the last time Tokyo was hit by a big earthquake was in 1923, when a 7.9 magnitude quake killed more than 100,000 people, many of them in fires. 

 Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake. They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan area since the March disaster.