Rocks and Minerals

1. Rocks and Minerals Paul Bunyon Dr. Houghton Earth Science Honors period 5 5/27/10 1. Objective: To understand the formation, composition, and significance of rocks and minerals. • 4. Discussion: • Rocks are constantly being recycled into new forms through the rock cycle (RocksandMinerals.com 2005). • The age of a rock can be found using radiometric dating (Gore2002). • The age of a rock relative to surrounding rocks can be found using relative dating (Gore2002). Figure 1. (From left to right) Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks, the three main categories of rock (ethosmarblecare.co.uk, scienceclarified.com, edu.pe.ca). • 2. Introduction: • Minerals are naturally occurring, inorganic crystalline compounds (Tarbuck and Lutgens 2009). • There are thousands of different minerals (Tarbuck and Lutgens 2009). • Minerals make up rocks (Tarbuck and Lutgens 2009). • Rocks are classified as igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic (RocksandMinerals.com 2005). • We use rocks for all sorts of handy stuff – like construction, artwork, and jewelry. • 5. Conclusion: • Rocks are important to many fields of science. • Geologists study layers of rock to determine characteristics of that time period (Tarbuck and Lutgens 2009). • Paleontologists and paleoecologists consider the rock that surrounds a fossil to better understand that fossil (Hirst). • Archeologists frequently come across rock artifacts that have survived hundreds of years (Schwab2004). Figure 2. A simple diagram of the rock cycle (uwsp.edu). Figure 3. An illustration of where the rock cycle takes place (indiana.edu). 3. Methods: Research on this topic performed through the Internet and textbooks. Figure 4. A cutaway ground section illustrating sediment layers (wps.prenhall.com).