2.

2 Rock Cycle

Hello and welcome back. Today I will tell you about rock cycle. Earth crust
is made up of three major rock types: volcanic, sedimentary and metamorphic
rocks.
We need to understand that when our Earth was very young, there was a
period when its surface was molten. This molten material is called magma.
As the planet was cooling down, magma was growing more solid, more
crystal-like, and the first rocks were formed. These rocks are called volcanic,
igneous or simply magma rocks.
Magma rocks are still being formed today - remember volcanic lava, or
magma eruptions near mid-ocean ridges. As these were the first rocks to be formed
on our planet, this is where our story of rock cycle will begin.
After the first rocks were formed, the Earth kept cooling down until its
temperature fell below water boiling point. As soon as the first rain drop fell on the
Earth surface, it gave start to weathering of magma rocks. The first particle of rock
broke off and was washed down to become the first grain of sand on the first
beach. As time was flowing, more particles floated down, depositing on the bottom
of the newborn ocean, building up a formation as thick as a few kilometers. At the
bottom of this bed, water was flowing through sand grains, bringing in sticky clay
particles that were forming something similar to cement. Under an enormous
pressure of the upper formations, loose mass of sand became a solid rock which is
called sandstone. You can build it yourself if you make a pile of sand, pour glue on
it and put something heavy on top.
As life appeared on our Earth, a new form of building material became
available. Tiny shellfish living in oceans extracted calcium from seawater to make
their shells harder. As these shellfish were dying, their shells were falling down to
the ocean floor like snowflakes and depositing there like massive snow blankets.
Thousand years later, these blankets also turned to rock - in this case, into
limestone.
 This process of particle deposition is called sedimentation, and rock built
this way are called sedimentary rocks. The type of building material determines the
type of rock: sand grains build sandstone, calcium builds limestone, mud builds
mudstone. Large rivers such as the Amazon, the Nile, or the Mississippi, leave tons
of mud in their deltas; all of this mud someday will turn into mudstone.
Sedimentary rocks are usually easy to spot. Because they are built on
bottoms of oceans and lakes, they form layers and look like pages of a closed book
if you put it on the table and look from the side. You can find such rocks alongside
of roads laid through hills or mountains. Don’t be surprised as you find
sedimentary rock high up the mountains, far from any ocean - this is because the
surface of the Earth is in constant motion.
After sedimentary rocks have been formed, many things can happen to them.
They can suffer erosion (destruction by wind, water, or other forces) and make
building material for new generation of sedimentary rocks. Due to tectonic activity,
they can get buried deep under the Earth surface. Deep down, high pressure and
temperature will change the very texture of the minerals, transforming them into
crystalline rock. For example, limestone will turn to marble, and mudstone will
transform into schist. Rocks that have suffered such metamorphosis are called
metamorphic rock.
The first particle weathered out of a magma rock could have traveled its way
to the Earth crust and back by many routes. It might have been part of sedimentary
rock that were again destroyed by erosion and build a new generation of rocks of
the same type. It might have been transformed into another type of rock. Finally,
any of these rocks might have been buried under the Earth surface due to global
geological processes such as continental collision or subduction, when one tectonic
plate moves beneath another and sinks down under.
If that was the case, they might have melted down, and their atoms might
have escaped to the surface as volcanic rock and given start to a new cycle.
 This is what we call rock cycle. In brief, volcanic eruption gets lava onto the
surface, when it is cooled down, gets weathered and eroded, transforming into a
sedimentary rock as the rock fragments or clasts are cemented.
Then the sedimentary rock gets buried deep down, where heat and pressure
cause recrystallization, which brings along formation of metamorphic rocks, and
the whole cycle repeats over and over again.
Typically, when we search for oil, we drill into formations built of
sedimentary rocks.
That is why it is very important for us to know types of sedimentary rocks,
their mineral compositions and depositional environments. This will be explained
in the next part of our course. See you.