Friday, November 19, 2010

Digging Deep - GEO 001

GEO 001
Drill Core
Class: Rock
Location: Unknown
Details: rock unknown

Sorry Sholesonian patrons, but I have been quite busy this past week and literally have not had the time to write out any posts. It is now finally Friday, so I have a bit of time to write up this post that was supposed to be for Wednesday, but studying got in the way. Now unfortunately, today's specimen has no locality or identification information at all because I purchased it at the same Newark, New York yard sale that I got the 'Peach Fuzz' piece from. So there were plenty of cheap large and interesting rocks/minerals but most no longer had any sort of label making them essentially worthless for a museum but very nice to look at and useful for teaching.

This piece from the Geology Collections is a drill core sample from some unknown locale. Drill core samples are very important for collecting scientific data. They are used predominantly in geological surveys to determine the strata layers and collect samples of deep rocks in the crust. But they are also heavily used in the oil industry, where the oil companies hire geologists to find the best places to drill for oil, so they use these rather long rock samples (this one is only 26 cm but they are usually feet long) to determine the makeup of the rock layers.

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