Saturday, July 12, 2008

Vulcan visits Neptune






















At Salty Brine Beach in Rhode Island, one place you can get a ferry to Block Island, there is a long jetty of massive granites and pegmatites, some filled with garnets and black mica, orange feldspar and of course, quartz, the most abundant mineral on earth.

In between some of these rocks I found these black things which I think are surf polished coal. I wonder what the story is. There was also a stone alongside them with glassy bubbles so who knows where they come from. Perhaps remnants from an old foundry, but why out there mixed up in the jetty?

Once I read that all the water on the earth came from volcanoes early in earth's history. I had trouble believing that all that is cool and refreshing came from a source which is scalding and hot. But I suppose the heat of the core vaporizes stone, breaking it down into elements that could then bind and create water. It seems like it must be pretty hard to keep Oxygen and Hydrogen apart if they have any chance of getting together.

1 comment:

Chris Kreussling (Flatbush Gardener) said...

Could have been cargo from a shipwreck offshore.