Ten things every geology major ought to know
I hereby initiate a geoblogosphere meme...
What are ten things that every geology major ought to know about? The only restriction is you're not allowed to list anything that has already been listed by a previous geoblogger. You don't have to list everything, just ten important things.
My ten:
- The relationship between cooling rate and crystal size in igneous rocks.
- The fact that rocks can flow, given sufficient temperature and pressure [and low strain rate, for the purists out there].
- The idea that sedimentary rocks reflect specific depositional settings. By studying modern depositional settings and the sediments they contain, we can interpret ancient sedimentary rocks in light of the conditions under which they accumulated.
- The fact that the chemical stability of molecular configurations (minerals) changes with different temperatures and pressures (metamorphism).
- Large Igneous Provinces, and their potential role in tectonics and expressing mantle plumes.
- Elastic rebound theory for the origin of earthquakes.
- The notion of partial melting, and its relationship to Bowen's Reaction Series.
- An understanding of the carbon cycle, and an understanding of the atmospheric physics that facilitate global warming.
- The role that rivers play in shaping the landscape: nickpoints, terraces, quarrying, abrasion, drilling of potholes, etc.
- The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, which is extremely old in comparison to human life -- and the reasons we think it's so old [Pb isotopes, etc.].
Please, add to these... So far Mel at Ripples in Sand, Chris at GoodSchist, Eric at The Dynamic Earth , Lockwood at Outside the Interzone, Bryan at In Terra Veritas, Kim at All My Faults..., Garry at Geotripper, and the Short Geologist at Accidental Remediation have added their top tens. Plus, Silver Fox at Looking For Detachment posted 4, and the comments section on this post has another suggestion from Michael Welland (of Through the Sandglass) and others. That's 85 things to know... and counting...
3 Comments:
Here's my ten.
I'm not going to try to list ten things, in part becuase I can't keep up with the criterion of avoiding what everyone else has said! But I'll submit one:
Earth Systems - the connectedness of everything (and I don't mean that in a philosophical or new age sense). For example, the feedback between rainfall, tectonics and orogenic systems - don't look at anything in isolation!
Ok: here.
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