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Asked by anon-276216 to Katy on 12 Jan 2021.
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Katy Chamberlain answered on 12 Jan 2021:
That’s a great question! I did some fieldwork on Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic and we found a really cool eruption deposit that had a big range of different rock types. When we analysed it we could see frozen magmas mixing together in the rocks- like a marble cake. We think this means that these different magmas mixed together inside the crust a very short time before the eruption happened.
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Comments
Graham commented on :
I think the most interesting rock I have analysed is a ‘cap carbonate’. They formed directly on top of glacial rocks after the very long Cryogenian ice ages, which ended around 635 million years ago. Our work shows that they formed as sea levels rose because of global warming and the melting of ice sheets after Snowball Earth.
Tony commented on :
My favourite rock that I’ve studied is the Rhynie Chert – it doesn’t look very exciting, just a bluey-grey colour with funny lines and circles on the surface. It’s a really famous fossil deposit though, from Scotland, and it preserves some really old plants that grew on the plant over 400 million years ago, and they haven’t been squashed like most plant fossils so you can still see all the cells and how they grew.
There’s a great TV series with Iain Stewart called ‘How to Grow a Planet’ – if you can find it on iPlayer it has a great explanantion of it, and how it was discovered.
Malcolm Wookiee commented on :
I was very lucky to get my hands on a piece of the original Pallasite meteorite found in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia.
Dr Pallas was wandering around Siberia in the 1770’s when he came across an enormous meteorite around 700 kg. If was a type never seen before so he got to name this type and hence why they are now called Pallasite meteorites.
After studying it for while he sent it off on a world tour to other scientists. however by the time he got it back it was considerably smaller as everyone had nicked bits off it! I think only 500kg was returned.
It is particularly beautiful as it has little bits of a gem called Olivine in it. These are pale yellow, glass like pieces surrounded by the rest of the metal of the meteorite. When a slice is made of the meteorite and polished, it looks like little yellow bits of stained glass.