There are a lot of intriguing ideas and concepts in geology. Some are easier to wrap our minds around than others. One of the most phenomenal has got to be the idea that a 3 inch x 1 inch glass slide with a sliver of rock attached that has been sawed, sliced, glued and polished to a thickness of 0.03 millimeter can provide clues to the history of an entire mountain range.
That’s 0.00118110236 of an inch of rock on a glass slide. Put under a special type of petrographic microscope and studied, this rock sliver or thin section can offer unparalleled insight not only to a mountain range but to the tectonic history of an entire continent.
Which means that knocking off a fist–sized piece of rock from someplace like this…
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| Beaver Dam Mountains in southwest Utah |
…and sawing, slicing, and then gluing a sliver onto one of these…
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| web image courtesy here |
…and then polishing this sliver to within 0.00118110236 of an inch of its life so that you see something like this…
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| Sheared bands in gneiss with C–S fabrics in cross-polarized light |
…can provide us phenomenal insight into how and when this came into existence.
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| Beaver Dam Mountains in southwest Utah |
