One of my favorite things about geology is how much we don’t know. For example, the earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, but the oldest rock we have ever found is 4.28 billion years old. That’s 260,000,000 years we don’t know anything about. 260,000,000 is also longer than the amount of time it […]

One of my transitional moments between childhood and adulthood was when watching a nature program about caves (yep, you know the one). And watching people have to scramble over sharp rocks and use harnesses and ropes to get places, I realized: caves are not made for people. To that point, most of the thought I’d […]

After I was in Jordan in February 2013, my Mom and I went to Lebanon. I wrote a bit about it then, but didn’t get into the rock-fun we had. On one of our day-trips, generously arranged by our family-friend Adla Chantila,  the Director of Finance and Information Technology at the Al-Mukasad Foundation, we visited Qozhaya, the Monastery of […]

Jordan is a desert, if you didn’t catch that. And like all good deserts, it comes with great sunsets. Unlike all deserts, it also has a massive body of water in the middle of it. Undrinkable, over 1000 ft below sea level, but the Dead Sea is a body of water. Even if you can […]

My entire house is covered with maps, mostly geological maps. No, seriously: (I’m in the middle of a sewing project with my Fangirl Congress/Sewing Circle, so there will be lots of sewing paraphernalia in these pictures. View at your own risk) When I first moved in my apartment last March, I wanted to decorate and […]

As Achebe got from Yeats: things fall apart. One of the ongoing comforts of geology is that everything is always moving, slowly-but-surely. Just as mountains are always rising, other mountains are always being ground down. Actually, all mountains are always being ground down, they only rise if they are eroded at a slower rate than […]

When sand dunes sit for a long time, the sand at the very bottom of the dune slowly becomes rock–sandstone. Like other kind of sedimentary rock (rock which forms by dirt and stuff piling on and on and on over centuries and millennia) the oldest rock is at the bottom and the youngest at the […]

Before I get into our chapter on sandstone, using pictures from Jordan’s wonder of the world, Petra, I think we should spend some time in recent history. Recent from the perspective of rocks, so we will be covering 3000 years of the human history of Petra. To understand the fun of Petra, it’s important to […]