Attention all GeoloJUSTS!

Red view 2

This one looks like flint to me, which is also chert
View one

Flint Michigan view two

Ok that's all I care to post, when I smack one rock another it's smells kinda burnt, so could I get sparks? Also was there a natural precursor to steel as its used in flint and steel?

These are obviously dinner rolls.

>OP in charge of focusing a camera

Veeky Forums has geologists?

From time to time. Usually they're Geophysics and try to fit in. Generally us Geologists will try to avoid these annoying ass threads.
>What's this rock guise!1!! Look at this shitty out of focus picture!

Geophysicsfag here

I used to collect rocks and minerals back in the day.
They had books advertised at Barnes and Noble and Borders back in the 90s.
Some even came with samples.
Geology for kids was a thing back in the day.
Although I have to admit I was the only person in all my schools that bought the books.
But they can look awesome and kickass.
Many minerals have more personality than the people I come across.
Seriously.
Look at Opal. or Moonstone.
Some metallic composites are badass.
Then there's the shit with patterns.
Crystals can look majestic as fuck.
Don't shit on Geology.
It's got style.

Look at that.
$30,000 for an opal ring.
Geology ain't look'n so bad now, is it?

You survey an area.
You dig and chip.
Boom. Mo-nay.

It's no better then when they do it in person.

>oh you're a geologist, my son found this rock can you tell me what it is?

Hunk of granite, every fucking time.

My dad does residential remodel. When I was in college if I went home to visit sometimes I would go along with him to check some houses. The second he tols the homeowner I was a geology major they would be asking me to look at their countertop. 90% of the time it's fake trash, massive cobble class some rounded some angular, obvious dye color matrix, resin filling in the cracks...it's called "Brazilian River Rock, cool huh, just think it came all the way from South America".... Un-huh super cool

Or better still had this guy get really hyped to show me this bathroom vanity top, said it was called fossil rock and he had such a boner for it, see how you can see all these dark fern fossils in the rock. Isn't that amazing some prehistoric plant made that pattern and now it is in my bathroom.

It's just fucking dendritic crystalization. I never have the heart to tell them.

>It's just fucking dendritic crystalization. I never have the heart to tell them
that one's really common.

The geo professor up at our CC has a sample of pyrolusite dendrites, they're really common around here. He's telling the class it's fossil ferns. I keep my mouth shut, it's not my job to correct him in front of the class.

That's shameful.

I taught intro level geo classes at my Uni in exchange for a tuition refund while I was doing my masters, it was upsetting how fucking dumb kids are these days. Noted this class was nicknamed "rocks for jocks" to graduate with any degree you needed a lab science and all the football team kids, business majors, and art students would puss out of Physics, Chem, or Bio and come to our department. We offered a 1 unit class that counted as a lab. Couldn't be easier, super basic shit.

These kids can't write or think their way out of a wet paper bag. You have to hold their hand and spoonfeed them everything. I'm not just talking about geology stuff, the number of times I had to walk a business major through converting units was enough to drive me insane.

but you're a rockdoc

>rocks for jocks

I remember there was a class called that back at my school. It makes one wish that someday they purposefully add rigor to that class so that it would no longer just be "rocks for jocks". The tears of idiots would be delicious.

Look how many replies this thread got.
I posted a genuine 'what mineral is this' thread with high quality, in focus photos and got two off topic replies.

What mineral was it?

I went on a road trip with the local geo club and we stopped at a shop that sells custom stone tables and headstones and looked at their stock, and literally 90% of the rocks were labeled as granite, including things that had clear bedding planes in them, some with great huge snails and brachiopods preserved...
the owner let us dig through his scrap pile though, so shit was pretty cash. came back with loads of marble, larvikite, granites (real and imagined)...

everyone thinks they've got something special. examples:
tl;dr: some kook found a rock with a face on it and told everyone it's a petrified bigfoot head

Could be chert. Could also be quartzite. I don't understand though, what's your question?

Is it true that geologists are taught to lick stones?

The only time we ever lick stones that I'm aware of is to quickly identify halite but I'm still an undergrad. I would never suggest, for example, to ever lick Realgar

some stones.
you can identify certain minerals by taste. halite, for example.
other minerals, like cinnabar or stibnite, we don't lick.

You should be able to ID something like halite without licking it, but you could if you wanted to.

While I was taking geology at uni we, people from the department, would often go out for drinks at the end of the day. One of my peers brought along her roommate who was hospitality management or nutrition or some other such major. She starts going on and on about the healing properties and the different auras of various natural crystals. She won't shut up about it, she thinks since we are all geo people this will get our dicks harder than corundum.

Everyone is just letting it happen, but I had never met this girl before, so I guess I didn't know the drill. She pulls out this necklace calls it "Blue Sandstone", starts telling us about how it must have formed in some mineral rich location and after eons in the ground it absorbed so much energy that now it radiates it out and keeps her grounded. Isn't it amazing how something natural can be so beautiful, look how it sparkles and shines it reflects from all angles just like someone who is grounded should. I wish more people would embrace the power of natural gemstones....like you all do.

I can't take it, so I just tell her straight up, that it's glass, normal man-made glass. She is probably older than that hunk of garbage silica, in fact I'm pretty sure it is a Venetian method from centuries ago to sell waste glass. It has no crystal habit, it has no natural energy, it does less to keep you grounded than the beer glass in my hand (at least that has beer in it).

She got pretty pissed. I don't get it are we just supposed to let people be wrong?

>I don't get it are we just supposed to let people be wrong?
yes

I just don't understand that.

I lick fossil bone to ID it if there's any question what it is. It's more porous than most rocks so it sticks to the tongue in a certain way others don't.

aside from that I don't go around licking rocks much. Even with bone I don't swallow after licking it, a lot of that stuff is radioactive.

my boss is like that.
I don't say anything, if it makes her feel better to carry around rocks that call to her it's not my business to deny the placebo effect.

People choose beliefs like this in favor of rationality. They are seeking a placebo that makes them feel good. Challenging that placebo is an attack to them. There's not much you can do.

>While I was taking geology at uni we, people from the department, would often go out for drinks at the end of the day
you wouldn't be geoscientists if you didn't
unless you were Muslims

Yeah I really knew I had found the right field of study when it became clear that everyone loved drinking and camping. Still think I should have been able to count that beer appreciation class as a geology elective.

I always wonder if a diamond might be sitting in all this fucking beach quartz I cant stop collecting. At least the quartz lately has had some decent crystalline structures to it.

I just found this board after browsing /K and /fit for about a year now. I want to get into mineral geoscience (start a collection) but I only know that basics of geo (I did yr 12 Geo and got the highest mark in the state if that matters, emphasis on basic geo as well). Where to start?

Just go on hikes and collect cool shit. Some people like to buy stuff from shows, I prefer my collection filled with stuff I found myself.

The funny part about your story is we have the same thing..... But for engineers.

Engineers have to take the basic, introductory mineralogy class in geo and many opt to take the structural and coal petrology courses as well when they're looking to get into these areas.

Without a doubt, engineers are the laziest, dumbest packs of kids we have ever had to deal with. That's right, we. For once my opinion isn't even my own, it's a collective of the entire geo cohort so we try our best to stick together in groups, because the engineers are renowned for copying off each other and failing exams.

Halite and grain sizes in sedimentary features.

Also some compositions have certain tastes and smells, but only under certain conditions. That's more an experience thing you'll learn yourself in the field than taught.

Speaking of which, I've recently come into possession of a shitload of stibnite.
I just wanted to brag. I'm going to stick it in the garden somewhere and keep a nice sample on my rock shelf.

Research areas, look up the geological survey for your country (google it) and start asking yourself questions.
"Why is there sandstone here? "
"Why is this sandstone different to the last?"
"Why did it get finer grained as I walked uphill?"

Then you learn.

I was taught to rub stones on your teeth to tell siltstone from mudstone or shale.

I'm not good at mineral/rock identification. I got through my Earth Materials and Sedimentary Geology classes through excellent field work and class assignments not for mineral identification. I ended up with a B in both classes because I just don't do identification well and that's a lot of testing.

Identifying 60 different sandstones and conglomerates in a test is pushing my limits pretty far beyond breaking.

But mineral and rock identification is field work.... Unless you were doing structural, chemical or microbiology work? But even then it helps to know what you're looking at.

We were shown to take a bite and roll the grains around in your mouth, after some practice then difference between 0.0
5mm or even 0.1mm becomes quite obvious.

Our field work involved mapping sediments in road cuts and creating a stratigraphic column for the area and then a 3 day camping trip to the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah. Since both trips were about taking good field notes more than they were testing our ability to id individual rocks I got an A on both.

In Earth materials we took samples from an abandoned mine back to the lab and used ... oh, I can't remember what it was called. It strips inner shell electrons from elements and measures the light given off when the outer electrons cascade down then tells you what elements are present in the rocks. We used that for the final presentation in class.

My school's earth science grad recruiter invited me to a department barbecue after I gave a talk at a lunch panel and damn, there was a lot of beer. Both the earth science kids I know drink a fair bit but to be fair to one of them he's trans so I don't exactly blame him for drinking so much.

Heh, I'm Mormon, living in Utah and I dislike camping. When our school does field work with other schools it's pretty funny, we're the ones who don't drink and everyone wonders why we're there.

My geology department had a sign in office that said "Geology 1 Hall of Fame", and it just pointed at a trash can.

I've had students think that water flows North, not down hill, but North.

The engineering department at my school got in trouble for not making their students take an geology classes. They were at risk of losing their cred. So the Geo department made a special class just for them, it was a total joke, still being an engineer and not knowing jack shit about rheology or ground water?!

Oh yeah, we bring an extra cooler just for beer, sometimes a keg that we let sit in the nearby snowmelt stream. Not supposed to have alcohol in our department vehicles since it's a public school, so if we get busted the professor has trained us to say his wine/booze is ours.

I went to school with someone who did their geology undergrad in Utah and said the field camp was tense. All the Mormons sitting off at a different campfire or going to bed early while all the other more typical geonerds are busy getting sauced around the fire.

my advisor teaches historical geo, which is pretty much the rocks for jocks course here.
on a recent (multiple choice) exam, he asked which group went extinct at the permo-triassic boundary. One of the options was "bronies". A handful of undergrads picked it.
meanwhile, none of these COLLEGE STUDENTS seem to comprehend that you only need a tiny little dab of HCl on a rock to see if it's a carbonate or not. they'll soak a piece of shale or something and just put it back in the drawer without blotting it.

Please tell me that nowhere in your area is downhill North

They all use too much HCL. Everytime I teach basic mineralogy they are supposed to test calcite I warn them every time not to use too much, but they soak it every single time. The kids that come late get a special treat when they handle it a bunch and the skin on their fingers starts to dissolve. Always get a chuckle out of it because one of the questions on the lab is "which mineral feels soapy" they are supposed to say talc, but the late kids after touching all that HCL think everything feels like soap.

Not really, it's pretty flat, but when one of the multiple choice questions is downhill and they put north there is really no excuse.

We have a piece of travertine that's been so drenched in HCL it won't even fizz anymore. Our teacher puts it out from time to time to test us.

I'ts not possible to see the difference in grain size between a Silt and a Clay in the field, but it is possible to feel the difference in your mouth.
If you take a mudstone and chew on a small flake of it, a clay should feel smooth between the teeth, like soap. Silt will feel gritty, like if you get sand in your food on the beach.
You can also taste things like Petroleum if it happens to be a black shale (tastes utterly appalling).

X-Ray diffraction? Yeah that stuffs fucking sick.

Stratigraphic columns are only one part, but also fucking important. Most departments will teach you one thing at a time then combine it all in later courses, so only doing a strat column doesn't surprise me.

I'm scared that doesn't surprise me. Genuinely. These people got into a top 50 university.

>Too much HCL
Not gonna lie, I put the calcite into the bottle to see what would happen.
I learned, eventually.

>too much HCl
I dunno about you geologists, but for qualitative test, I always use lots and lots of the reagens to force the chemical balance towards the product.

The HCL is just a quick and dirty test to see if a sample has carbonate minerals.

You only need a drop unless you're blind as a bat

I know the mechanism.
But using only a little is no fun, is it?

Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS)? Works exactly as you described, you use high-energy electrons/protons/photons to ionise the atoms, which then relax to the ground ionic state and emit a photon. You probably don't want to look at the light given off though, since its X-rays.

X-ray diffraction is used to determine crystal structures, not for elemental analysis.

Running out while miles into the field and trying to distinguish limestone from dolomite is a pain in the ass.

You're right. My mistake.

Speaking of, what's your take on the dolomite dilemna?

Which one?

Call it Dolomite or Dolostone

Why doesn't it precipitate out of ocean water like snow

Or something else?

The one we were taught is why there's no dolomite being formed in modern time but there's shit tons of it in the deep past.

The dilemma is, how was it being created? There is no known mechanism in Earth science for producing primary dolomite, it's only formed when conditions are exactly right for altering limestone with magnesium into dolomite. So where did it all come from?

Ahhhh, the second one then. You ever read about white blooms? Sometimes carbonates just start precipitating out of the ocean seemingly for no reason in one spot. One theory I saw was that the enzymes that lifeforms use to make their tests remain active after death remain active after death, so all these snails die and their enzymes just keep plugging along making carbonates.

Anyways yeah why is there so much fucking dolomite when we don't see it forming now. Good thing to study if you are a sed or oceanography type.

precipitation of carbonate in marine aquariums is caused by supersaturation or changes in pH.

just a thought, but it would seem either one would be possible with enough evaporation and/or biological activity. Temperature gradients could contribute as well.

From experience I can verify that once the process starts it forms a chain-reaction that keeps dumping carbonates until the dissolved fraction is much lower than normal.

What about non-organic carbonates then?

can you rule out diagenetic remineralization of calcite/aragonite by magnesian pore fluids? you go back far enough, practically everything's been remineralized or recrystallized along the way...

I wouldn't know, I never take chemicals out of the lab.

>not roaming the woods with an erection, a grin and half a liter of hydrochloric acid.
why even be a geologist?

I'm not.

I once had the bright idea to clean my kettle with some conc. HCl. It worked beautifully until I realised I spilled a drop on the nylon filter and melted it into a blob.

>no pics

I thought that was more or less the accepted theory.

I clean all my glassware with concentrated acids.

What's the difference between geology and geophysics?
Which one has more job openings for a bachelors?

...

very accurate
t. paleofag

Saved. Next time someone asks me the difference I'm sending them this.

>u double dot
That makes me sick.
That being said, I'm actually right in the middle there. Working at Berkeley on a portion of MATERHORN related research, specifically re: WRF-IBM.

> not using Newton's notation for Newton's laws
:^)

I'm finishing my PhD in geochem this year. Good luck to all on the job hunt, things are pretty grim these days...

it's always been cyclical. I used to work in metals mining until that tanked and I crossed over to environmental and remediation.

If nobody's getting paid to dig holes you can bet someone's getting paid to fill some in.

Out of 80 graduates this year, only two of us (me and one other) -want- to do environmental geology work.

Not saying we'll get jobs, but we're keen and the others aren't.

Like I said, I started off in mining. I liked the pay.

then I found out how much environmental contractors charge and I started my own firm and haven't looked back. I've made millions. Or at least my company has and continues to.

I personally retired at 32 and spend most of my time shitposting on Veeky Forums when I'm not vacationing somewhere tropical with coral reefs to photograph.

not that anyone here is likely to believe my claims, but you can instead just talk to environmental contractors anywhere. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Op, I acknowledge that this thread is shit but why did you people reply?

I want to continue after my undergraduate into planetary geology. I'm hoping to get an early start on asteroid mining and planetary mineral exploration.

Yup.

Hey fuck you I'm a nice guy

looking to hire a geochemist PhD, user?

best of luck with that. I fear you may be old before that one really booms.
sorry, no. I wouldn't know what to do with you, you're way overqualified for my crew. The companies and government agencies I work for might though.

I'm the first guy....
What about a masters graduate with a thesis focusing on geochemistry?

Or more realistically, any tips on where to apply? I'm looking for outside the country (Australia) as that's a good 1/4 the reason I chose to quit my career, give up a promotion and drive 3,500km to move states and commence study after all.