When I Say "Birds Are Dinosaurs" And You Say "No You Know What I Mean, When We Say Dinosaurs We Mean

Shout out to yet another day of me ignoring my homework! I knew you were there the whole time! I was consumed with self inflicted brain pain and did nothing! It's hard to be alive! Thank you!

Trying to reorganize my rock collection on my shelf by how much I want the specific rocks to be displayed. The problem is that I'm a geology major and I love all of them

Hullo-geology student.

These looks like fluvial, or river, cobbles. They get the rounded shape from moving down-stream, the rounder the rock the longer they stayed in the river.

The top one on the right, sort of white-ish, looks like a chert pebble. This is made of the same stuff as quartz, and is super resistant to weathering, so they last a long time, especially in river systems.

Both of the middle ones look sort of like granite or perhaps a breccia. Breccia is a form of sedimentary rocks where smaller rocks get cemented together and make a bigger rock. The angular shapes of the rocks looks like feldspars, indicatinf a granite that got weathered. I think that the bottom left one is also a granite.

The top left one and bottom left one I dont really know. They both kinda look like granites, but it is difficult to tell. The bottom left one looks like it cooled with magma mixing, so there are larger grains with smaller ones, a texture called porphyritic.

I should note, this is based almost entirely on grain size, coloration, and pattern. I am also guessing because I don't know the geologic history of the area. Soooo i might be wrong but this seems like the most likely based on the images.

Thanks for showing me rocks i think theyre really nice

i wish i had a geologist friend who could sit me down and tell me everything about these rocks and what kind of rock it is and how they were formed and everything about them:(

theyre just normal rocks but i want to KNOW about them.

Geology of Natural Disasters and How to write them into your fictional universe.

So, you want to write about a natural disaster to advance your plot and torture your players/characters even more? Let me tell you how, accurately.

I feel like unless it is a volcano, natural disasters are a pretty slept on plot drivers, and some of them are really cool and unique! Today, I will talk to you about land slides, earthquakes (And earthquake related disasters), and volcanoes.

Landslides: Probably one I see the least in stories, but one that would be incredibly interesting to write into a plot where they believe in curses. Landslides can happen along ocean bluffs, slightly hilly areas, and highly mountainous areas, this means it is something that can happen in most landscapes. But what can trigger a landslide? Mostly all you need to trigger a landslide could be just abnormally large amounts of rain, excessive deforestation (with a little bit of rain), or an earthquake. If you don't want to use deforestation or an earthquake as a catalyst, a really cool indicator that the land is slipping and may be prone to a collapse is J hooked trees.

This indicates that there is soil creeping slowly over time, and it may lead to a major landslide.

2. Earthquakes: Probably one of the easiest things to write, earthquakes can happen anywhere, but they are most common in places that are tectonically active areas. There are about three types of environments you can expect earthquakes to be common. The first is just rugged mountains, if your landscape looks like this, you should write in earthquakes. Associated hazards could be landslides, avalanches, and large falling rocks.

The next landscape could be a thin mountain range, next to the ocean, very scenic, but very dangerous. Essentially, I am describing a subduction zone environment.

Earthquakes in these areas could equal a couple different associated disasters. Scenario one: A very large earthquake happens, and the ocean begins to recede. This is a tsunami, enough said. If you are writing a tsunami though, please, please, do not write it as a large wave, thank you. Also, a common way people are hurt by tsunami's are from them going into the ocean because they don't understand a tsunami is going to happen.

Scenario two: A large earthquake happens, your characters are in a valley and suddenly the ground begins to liquify as the ground shakes, once the shaking stops, the ground becomes solid like nothing ever happened, except everything has suddenly sunk into the now hard ground. This is called liquefaction and it typically happens in areas that have loose dirt or lots of saturated soil.

Scenario three: There are a lot of small earthquakes, they do not cause a lot of damage, but you begin to notice that one of the isolated mountains has a plume rising. Earthquakes can indicate lava moving underground and the filling of magma chambers.

The next environment that can host lots of earthquakes would be regions that have a lot of really deep valleys and small mountain ranges (not cone volcanoes), but overall seems pretty flat.

This indicates a transform fault like the San Andreas. If you want to hint at there being earthquakes in the area, you can show fence posts that are suddenly several feet out of line at a dilapidated farm or something similar.

(These earthquakes are different because they are cased from sideways movement, not an up-and-down movement this hint can only be used for this environment). Volcanoes would not be found here, but liquefaction and landslides could still occur here.

4. Volcanoes: If you thought earthquakes had a lot of information, volcanoes do too. First you have to ask yourself, what kind of volcano you want to have, what kind of eruption style? So lets break down the kind of eruptions you can have and what their landscapes look like. Hawaiian Shield volcano: This will produce a smooth fast lava, the landscape typically is pretty flat, but there will be small cones and the rocks can have a ropey or jagged texture and the rocks will be almost exclusively black to dark red.

Stratovolcanoes: These will be solitary mountains, typically, that look like perfect cones (Picture shown in earthquake section). These will have large ash cloud eruptions and pyroclastic flows, they may have some lava, but typically most damage is done from the pyroclastic flows (think Pompeii). Some hints of these, other than describing the cone features (which can be hidden by other mountains), would be to talk about petrified wood! Trees can get fossilized in the ash and I imagine it would be very strange to find this rock that clearly looks to be a piece of wood, but its a rock. Subcategory- Calderas: Used to be a large stratovolcano, but they erupt so explosively that the entire cone collapses and creates a basin.

There are a lot of kinds of volcanoes out there, so forgive me for just putting an infographic and then talking to you about these really rare types of eruptions that I feel like people should know about.

Okay lets talk about blue lava (kind of) and black lava

You will notice the lava is still red in the middle of this image, during the day these would look like a normal eruption, but at night the burning sulfur would make it appear blue. Some cool features other than this, would be that any water in the area would become very acidic and burn the skin due to sulfuric acid. This would again be really cool if you are trying to describe a 'cursed' land.

Black lava: This happens only in the east African rift I believe, but it is a carbonatite lava, but if you are writing in a rift valley (where the continent is tearing apart to form a new ocean) this might be a cool feature. The lava will cool white and will quickly erode, it makes for a very alien landscape!

Anyway as always, this is supposed to be an introductive guide for the basics of writing geology to create cool landscapes/features into dnd or fictional universes, if you are a geologist please understand my oversimplification of tectonics, I didn't want people to run away.

Perks about learning German is that it makes geology terms so easy to understand

Fenster = window; literally a term we use for erosion or tectonics revealing lower beds

Augen = eye; also literally used to describe eye/almond shaped mineral grains in metamorphic rocks like gneiss (which I learned is also a German word).

Lagerstätte(n) = bed, deposit, directly translates to "storage place"; sedimentary beds with excellently preserved fossils. Actually had to look up the meaning as I took only one class and knew what "stätte" meant.

Inselberg = island mountain; an isolated ridge surrounded by a flat plain or pediment

If you know French, geomorphology is gonna be an easy one. Rouche moutonnée, cirque, arête, lacustrine... those are the ones I know off the top of my head.

“we only have bones as evidence so every scientist is just guessing stuff, right?” 🤨

Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.

i always listen to the minecraft ost while doing my geology homework so now i just permanently associate minecraft music with rocks