Geology+-+Woodside+Field+trip

=Woodside Field Trip aka The Fault Hunt= Peaceful Woodside Glen hides the evidence of some dramatic earthquakes. In the past, several big faults in the surrounding area have splayed their crack-lines, like giant bird's feet, through the Glen, their clues hidden beneath slips and ferns, cut through sediments, and solidified in stone. Led by Mr Beaton, students engaged in a geological treasure hunt, in a landscape they had thought was familiar until they discovered ... slickenslides, fault grooves, gouges stresses and drags, fault cracks filled with thick quartz veins while developing a mind-picture of how to recognize a range of interesting metamorphic rocks. Clambering and wading up the river, students became sedimentologists, noticing that the rocks get bigger and more angular the further upstream you go and the river-sorting was a lot worse than the more even sorting of the smaller weathered, broken rocks downstream. Woodside Glen consists of several kinds of metamporphic rocks - sandstones, mudstones, greenschists, quartzites and cherts. Students learned that by examining the minerals contained in the rocks, geologists can work out the depth and temperature at which the rocks were buried and formed. The Maungatua rocks were buried about 16 kilometres deep at about 450 degrees Celsius. The pressure on the rocks from deep burial and high temperatures morphed ancient sea sediments into rocks high in glinting mica, river beds into sandstones and siltstones and volcanic sediment into greenschists.
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Beware the Rudite!
A rudite is a mix of rocks and clay and very unstable! It may sit there for hundreds of years... then suddenly - with a CRASH! and a BANG! it collapses, trapping anybody underneath under tonnes of earth. Students learned to recognize a rudite so they don't become buried fossils in the future. They also learned safe ways to use a geology hammer, and became fashion statements in the obligatory safety goggles...
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And don't forget the duck....

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