Geojournal Week 04: A Melancholy Sediment

This week in Geo, we’re talking about Sedimentary Rocks.

And we’re supposed to find one, and post a picture. Well, this week, we finally had some good winter show up in C-Springs, so I have more reason than usual to not go outside. Instead, I decided to search for a rock the old fashioned geeky way: I googled “Cool Rock” and scrolled through the images to see what showed up.

In the results that WEREN’T about Rock and Roll, I found this beauty

(Source)

In looking for sedimentary stones, I saw the layering and thought “Aha! That’s going to be something that’ll work for this.” And indeed, reading through the article and the comments, my suspicions were confirmed: It is a very cool rock.

I scrolled through and read the answer before making a stab at identifying it, so I can’t really pretend to spend the effort IDing it. I did guess it was of the appropriate type, so I have that going for me. This is shale, which is the boring part of the story. The thing that makes this cool is where this sample came from.

According to the owner, this sample was taken perhaps 20 feet from the summit of Mount Everest. Isn’t that neat? The Himalayas were once underwater, and then when the once-island of India converged on the continent, that low rock was sent up and up and up.

A very cool rock indeed!

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