Simplification of Geology: 2020

My name is Silicon. I am the heavier sister of Carbon.

While my lighter and thinner sister Carbon makes up the life on planet Earth, I make up the heavy rocks forming the earth’s crust.

My sister Carbon, with her 2 brothers from Oxygen forms a light blanket of "CO2" called carbon dioxide like a layer of glass on a glasshouse that keeps me warm. CO2 feeds the plants that feed the animals, and they put bubbles in the waters that carve the rocks with holes so that they can hold water like a sponge.

I and my 2 brothers from Oxygen, called SiO2 or "quartz" for short, form real glass and the rocks that cover the planet.

We were all born in a star which spit us out into space.

With time and the help of gravity we found ourselves all crowded together in a 14,000km diameter ball of rock which grew and got bigger as it got older and colder.

The more the earth expanded, the more cracks were formed in its crust until one day it broke up into 7 pieces called “Continents”.

As the earth grew, the continents started to drift like driftwood on a lake. We Silicon brothers share the 5-50km thick Crust of planet Earth with our cousins, Aluminium, Calcium and Magnesium.

Like us, they all have families, all with men from Oxygen. The crust was very porous and held water like a sponge. This allowed lakes to form in hollows, on top of the highest mountains, and water to be found below the driest deserts.

Below us was a 3000km thick mantle of molasses, half melted rock that my twin brothers shared mostly with my heavier cousin Magnesium. The next 4000km called the Core was out of my territory. It was a sea of melted Iron and Nickel with a solid centre, much like a kernel in a fruit.

I woke up from a deep sleep and found myself slowly moving around in my cozy bed I called Magma. I noticed that the slow current I was drifting in started to flow faster and faster and faster until it got so fast that I felt dizzy and a bit stoned. Then before I knew it, the mountain we were all in suddenly burped

and I found myself being slowly vomited out. It got lighter and brighter until I was able to see the sun and realize that my new day had started.

The ones before me I later found were expelled as ash that solidified in the air like hail. We called them Pumice.

When I got to the mountain’s mouth, I found I was flowing down with what seemed to me my entire Magma.

My brothers and I flowed into a very deep ocean and we cooled off so quickly that we didn’t have much time to form crystals. Our fine grained crystals were so small that they could be seen only with a magnifying glass.

As we cooled, we shrank, which really cracked us up. We filled our cracks evenly with all the space that we lost shrinking. Just like shrinking glaciers cracked when they melted and mud cracked when they dried out, we cracked when we cooled.

Because vertical cracks were erased by gravity and horizontal cracks stayed, we formed into pillar structures. Some of us found ourselves in very stressful situations and some of us eventually bent and folded.

We were called "Basalt" and we were so dense and heavy, we sank and covered most of the ocean floor. We were known for making good building materials because we broke up into boulders with shapes like blocks. Many of us landed up as pillars and walls for humans.

For those that cooled and solidified slowly because they remained underground, their only hope for freedom was to be pushed up out of the ground by some underground upheavals.

Those rocks we called "Granite". The slower the granite cooled, the bigger crystal grains it had and the courser, grainier, and lighter it was. Granite with time floated up to proudly show their face to the sun.

Some ended up being sliced and polished and used as kitchen table tops.

I ended up in the middle of the Continent called North America.

An ice age arrived. It started to snow and didn’t stop snowing until only mountain peaks were able to see the sun. The pressure of all that snow turned the snow into a flowing ice called "Glacier". When the ice age left, Glacier was very sad and started to cry.

North America got flooded, receding waters eroded the mountains and salts accumulated in the ocean over the depression caused by the heavy ice.

Eventually the inland ocean overflowed and drained.

As Continent drained and the melting ice moved to the slow dance called Erosion, rocks were broken into boulders, crushed into stones, polished into pebbles, ground into sand, and pulverized into silt.

Silt mixed with Aluminium and made clay so that humans could make their own rocks in any shape and form they wanted, like bricks tiles and vases.

The glacier moved like an amoeba and sculptured the continent like it had giant clawing hands. When the glacier started to melt, the draining waters carved bays of all sizes, from very large ones to very small ones. The residue of rocks on the ice accumulated in the rivers of the glacier melt. When the glacier finally melted, the rocks that had fallen on it accumulated as hills called moraines.

Rivers washed the rocks down to the sea, breaking them up along the way, until the rocks reached the oceans where they were broken into sand by the pounding waves and washed out by the swaying tides to cover the ocean floor. The silt, mud and sand accumulated as sediment and the pressure of the ocean squeezed them so tightly together that siltstone, mud stone, and sandstone were formed. These sedimentary rocks which housed oil, natural gas and coal were used by humans for building houses, walls and bridges.

I eventually got washed down to the ocean and lived a while as a sedimentary rock.

There I got mixed up with a bunch of sea shells.

We were so tightly squeezed together that my crystals got re crystallized. From then on I was called "Limestone". Because sea shells provided the sand with calcium carbonate CaCO3, the Si atoms in the sand couple with C atoms from life, make sandstone into a much more enduring limestone. Because water with CO2 made holes in me, you will find me wherever you find caves.

Limestone was used to build the pyramids and expensive buildings built to last longer than sandstone buildings.

I didn’t stay Limestone for long. I got buried very deep and the pressures and temperatures were so high that my crystals got aligned like solders on a march. I got harder and more beautiful and others started to call me "Marble".

Sedimentary rocks changed their crystalline structure under great temperatures or pressures. Their crystals got aligned and layered or foliated more and more, the deeper the rocks were buried. Shale made from pressed mud stone and many with fossils changed to a different rock dependent on how deep it was buried.

First into Slate, then finally into Gneiss who is stripped with foliated crystals like a tiger. As if the fossils of Shale changed into the tiger stripes of Gneiss.

Sandstone, pressed deep under the ground, is changed into Quartzite. Limestone, pressed deep under the ground is changed into "Marble". And that is what happened to me! After my afternoon nap, I was heaved out from underground and saw the sun a second time, no longer as Limestone, but now as "Marble".

Marble was used to make beautiful floors and buildings and statues made to last even longer than those made from Limestone. I was so beautiful and hard with my aligned crystals that a human saw me one day and used me to make a statue so beautiful that many people came from far away to look at it.

One day as I was being moved to a new museum, the ship I was on sank and I found myself at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for my next move and contemplating on all the things that happened so far and wondering about what was to come.Listen to the text...

At a point in time and a point in space, life evolved on Earth and took root on its barren crust. Plants learned to manipulate sunlight and air to grow and multiply. As plants thrived, they dug their roots deep into the crust and gave it life, forming the 10-50 centimeters of the ground called humus that allows plants to live and animals to evolved into humans.

Man quickly learned to make his very own rocks by melting sand to make glass, or extracting cement from limestone and mixing it with sand to make concrete. Man shaped and baked clay into porcelain, and evolved to carve microscopic networks into sand for computers.

Some say man is like a virus and will one day kill its host planet Earth which gave it life.

Others say humans are sperms of planet Earth.

Just like plants ejaculate their seeds and animals ejaculate their sperm to replicate,

one day man will ejaculate himself far away from earth and go to another part of the universe to replicate Earth and her nature.

As I was contemplating, the Earth suddenly shook. Before I knew it I was being pushed under deeper and deeper into the Magma I woke up in. Earth was hit by a comet, and just at the place where I was meditating.

I melted in the warmth of my bed and before going to sleep, wondered what kind of rock I will be tomorrow.

Will I be Pumice in some human’s bathtub scraping the feet of a beautiful human?

Or part of a glass she drinks from?

Or part of her kitchen table top?

Or perhaps even as part of her breast implants.

As Silicon was dosing off to sleep, he dreamt he was back in the Magma from where he came, covered and entrapped in it by a layer of rock called the ocean floor.

He was relieved to know that “Ocean” was on top keeping the crust from melting, allowing both life to thrive on top and fire to burn below.

Continents of land floated over the crust like rafts drifting on a lake. Like floating driftwood, they drifted until stopped.

Weather watered it from above so that life could take root from the tops of mountains to the bottom of oceans.

Most of the land was covered by a thin layer of sand like a layer of dust which united with water and life to form “Humus”. Humus, the rock plants grow in, was a sponge soaked with water and with life. A tree grew and embraced a rock so tightly that when hit by a lightning, it was dislodged with the rock.

Time freed the jagged rock from the tight grip of the tree and it landed in a river that was flowing to the oceans far far away.

Water entered the cracks in the rock, froze into ice, expanded and pried the cracks open breaking the rock into small enough pieces to be carried down by the stream.

As the rocks rolled down to the ocean, boulders broke into scree and sand. Rocks of all sizes collected on the ocean beaches and were polished into pebbles and ground and pulverized by the waves into silt and clay. They were carried out by the tides to cover the ocean floor. The sediments formed layers that could be read millions of years later like chapters in the earth’s diary. Silt was press together into slate and carved into durable roof tiles.

When sand layers were pressed by the weight of the water and the weight of accumulating sediment, they turned into “Sandstone”. The mountains eroded and washed down to the ocean and the sand mingled with the life there and they found themselves bonded in bed together. A volcano erupted in celebration. Magma broke out of the crust as if to witness and give warmth to this bonding of life and sand called “Limestone”.

Limestone was press together into "Marble" and carved into beautiful statues.

Volcanoes erupted and ejaculated Magma like they were seeds, in squirts that cooled into sponge rocks called “Pumice”.

As if giving birth, so much Magma was ejected out that it covered up the volcanoes and stopped and blocked their flow. The Magma that ended up in the ocean cooled off fast and had a very fine crystal making them dense rocks called “Basalt”.

Magma that stayed inside cooled slowly within the volcano and had time to grow large crystals forming grainy rocks called “Granite”. The lighter granite gradually displaced the heavier basalt and escaped the confines of the volcano to float and to form the land called “Continents”.

With time, a granite deep under the earth floated up to its freedom. As it floated up, it raised layers of lighter sedimentary rock that were resting on it like logs.

This upheaval gradually drained the ocean above it dry. A bed of rock called “Salt” was left behind. It was the accumulation of all the salts washed down from the mountains that were washed down into the ocean by Erosion.

Life buried under ground decomposed into soft black oil called “Petroleum”. Other life decomposed into a soft black rock called “Coal” which when cooked and rolled deep in the ovens of the earth turned into a hard white rock called “Diamonds”.

A mountain broke thru what was once an ocean. Then it started to snow. The snow covered the land until only peaks of mountains were visible.

The pressure of the snow turned the snow into a flowing ice called “Glacier”. The glacier moved like an amoeba and carved the land like an artist, grinding the rocks underneath into sand and silt.

When the glaciers finally melted, the rocks from the crumbling mountains that fell on the ice accumulated into hills and were left behind as “Moraines” that soon sprouted with life.

THE END

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Simplification of Geology

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

INDEX (small)

Geology in a story (small)