Today I'm going to demonstrate your assignment for this week, which is to explore your local geology.

In this assignment, we're going to ask you to select a geologic feature that's of interest to you, that's nearby and easy to get to. Then we're going to encourage you to visit that feature and to make observations and to document your observations with notes and also photographs. And then we're going to ask you to share your observations, your notes, and your photographs, in the forum with your fellow classmates. In terms of tools and materials, you absolutely will need to have notebook, pencil, and camera. These will be essential. In addition, you might be able to take advantage of a hand lens, which would allow you to look at your rock samples up close, observe the mineralogy and the texture. You also might be able to take advantage of a compass if you have one, a Brunton compass that allows you to measure the orientation of different geologic structures. And potentially you might bring a rock hammer. Be careful with the rock hammer, though, because you'll need to make sure you have permission to collect samples in the region that you're going to if you want to bring your rock hammer along. So I'll be heading out into Central Park, which is right across the street from the American Museum of Natural History, and it's a terrific place to explore geologic features, because it has really exciting outcrops throughout the park. So, let's head out into Central Park and see what we can find. [SOUND]. This outcrop is the feature that I've chosen to study. And I selected it because of several different characteristics. The outcrop shows evidence of folding, so

it has interesting structure. There's a variety of different mineral assemblages here. There's different types of rock present in this worn out crop, and it actually has a very interesting erosional feature that I'm interested in, in characterizing as well. The best way to identify rocks, which is actually very challenging to do, is to think at first in the microscopic about what are the minerals in the rock and what is the microscopic texture the, on the small scale. I am in Central Park and I'm not allowed to bring in a hammer and break a rock but I found a piece that I could pick up and look at closely. And actually, I have a, a hand lens here. So I can look at the minerals close up. So when I look at this rock in detail using my hand lens, but I could also just be visibly, you know, visually inspecting it, like this. What I see is a lot of very flaky, shiny a mineral that's flaky and shiny. And that's a mica. That's a great indicator of a metamorphic rock. So I can see that this rock is rich in mica. If I look at it close up, I actually can see crystals of garnet, which are very distinctive because they're pink, pinkish purple. So between mica and garnet, I know that this is actually a fairly high grade metamorphic rock. Another important aspect of identifying rock so there's not just the minerals, it's also the texture. So, when I look at this rock, I see that it's a very complex looking rock. It, it's not even in texture. It has a lot of variability. First of all, the, the, the mineral seem to be lined up in planes and we call that foliated. In addition, it actually has these more coarse grained regions that are lighter in color, different mineralogy and more finer grained regions. So those two pieces of evidence together help me to infer that this in fact a metamorphic rock because we

have this foliated texture. So now when we step back to try to look at the structures we observe, we can see that there's some very tight folding here. So we can step back and we can examine this fold from a slightly broader prospective, and we can see it expressed here, in the middle there, and then further up. That's all the same feature. So another feature that we see in this outcrop is, we see that while the rock overall is pretty dark, there's some lighter layers that in many cases follow well, they always seem to follow the bedding and often times they're even defining the folds. So we can see this lighter colored rock here, comes up to here and then down again. And you can see here there's places where it's accumulated a little bit and you can see that it's much lighter in color. This is an indication, most likely, that when this rock was metamorphosed, which is when rock is subjected to heat and pressure and it recrystallizes and changes. Now, technically in metamorphism you don't have melting because once you have melting then you're talking about igneous process, but actually at the highest temperatures of metamorphism you can get late stages, or, or, high temperature melting of a little bit of the rock, and then that flows into deformation and can define some of the def-deformation features. And that's what these light-colored granitic type rock layers are. So I guess that's where I am with what this rock is, a metamorphic rock, a schist. It shows evidence of deformation under heat and pressure. So if I step back, and I think now about other structures or features that I can observe there's actually one that's pretty exciting. And if we look here, we can see, that totally cross-cutting the bedding of these rocks there's this groove, and it cuts all the way across, and there's actually another groove over here.

And they're roughly parallel. There's more over here. You, once you see one, then as you start to look, you start to see more. These grooves are actually glacial striations. The striations are carved as the glacier moves across the area. Glaciers are really thick layers of ice, and they pick up rocks as they move. And those rocks accumulate in the very bottom layer of the glacier. So as the glacier scrapes along the surface of the Earth, the rocks in the bottom layer actually carve out the rock beneath it that the glacier is flowing over. And glacier striations is the feature that's left behind. Okay, so now I'm going to be writing down some of my observations so I have them to work with when I go back to the office. First of all, when you take field notes, you, of course, always have to write the date. And importantly you always observe the weather conditions. It's good to write the time of day. And this is just good practice. If you're a field geologist, you're taking field notes over an entire season, you want to be able to talk about how the weather might be playing a role in what you're observing. So that's one of those things that you would definitely want to keep track of. So, when I first observed the rock, I was looking close up. I was examining the mineralogy, and I saw abundant mica. And then also with my hand lens, I was able to see several other types of minerals. The, the mica you can see with a, with the naked eye. With the hand lens, you can see a pinkish chunky mineral called garnet. You can see a dark black mineral, which is likely to be amphibole. So I'm going to write those down as well. I also want to make a note about the texture of the rock because remember it's a combination of texture and mineralogy that helps you identify the rock. I'm also writing in notes about the structures. Both the folding I've observed, and also

the lighter colored rock that follows the bedding plains and some of the folding. Then, I'm also writing down the observations I'm making about the glacial striations, those erosional features that we have observed on this outcrop. Okay. So I have my compass and I'm going to use it to measure the orientation of the glacier striations. Okay. So 329. So now I'm going to write this down in my notebook. 329 degrees. So I'm going to line my, my compass up with that feature and make sure that the north arrow is lined up with north. And I see that I've got about maybe 330. I'm going to rotate my dial, it's actually very close which is a good sign. And I see yeah, 330. Okay, so this is my third measurement. Once again I line it up with the feature. I make sure that the north arrow is pointing north and I see it's about 332. When I did my measurement of the orientation of the glacial striations, I can see that on average it's about 330 degrees. But what does that actually mean if we're trying to think about how are these features oriented relative to north-south. So the way to think about that is to think about a circle, right? So here's north and south. This is zero degrees. This is 360 degrees. So 330 basically puts me right up about here. So actually what this number is telling me is that these features are oriented just northwest-southeast. So that's how these numbers translate to that orientation. [SOUND] I also want to capture, with photographic evidence, all of the observations that I write down in my notebook. The more photographs you take the better. Great. So now these photographs are an important part of the evidence that I've gathered, along with my observations that I've written down in my field notebook.

So between the photographs, the observations, I'll be able to go back and consult so many additional resources, geologic maps articles that are written about this area. And try to understand in more detail the processes that ultimately resulted in this outcrop being right here in Central Park.