OLD AS DIRT

Image by OliBac via Flickr

     Our Earth is very, very old; hundreds of thousands to millions or maybe even billions of years old and it is made up of rocks that come from minerals; minerals that are made up of the elements and dirt, even dirt is old and it is made up of the decaying organic matter mixed in with the previous two.  Dirt is interesting.  We owe a lot to dirt.

          I have a small bag of dirt in my rocks and minerals collection.  A billion generations from now it may be a diamond.  That is where the diamond began, as dirt, organic matter.  Dirt can be very fascinating when view through a magnifying glass or under a microscope.  It is living rock.  Well, the stuff moving in it isn’t really rock but it will eventually be a few million or billion years from now.  It is all part of Earth’s dynamics.  Dirt is made up of decaying organic matter along with a little sand.  It is the stuff we grow our food in.  Dirt is rather important in our lives. 

     Dirt, it is what coal and diamonds are made out of and the starting point for petroleum.  It is what we grow our food in and it is dirt that nourishes our forest that grows our trees that provide the air we breathe.  We need dirt.

     Dirt is made up of decaying organic matter and tiny minute and microscope bits or rock and minerals.  It is the loam, the top layer of soil on your lawn or in your garden.  Beneath that is the gravel and sand and beneath that is the bedrock that makes up the Earth’s crust, the ground we walk on.

     One day my nine year old grandson brought a rock into the house and wanted to know if it was Gold.  Of course it wasn’t but it looked a little like a rock filled with gold.  What he had found was a piece of sedimentary rock that had a heavy amount of Mica and Iron Pyrite in it and a narrow vein of Marcasite in a crack in a layer of Quartz.  He’d found a really nice piece of Shale beside the brook that comes off Elm Hill and runs along the edge of the property where I live.  My grandson was a little disappointed that he hadn’t found gold but happy with the rock he had.  He had started his own rock collection and was learning about rocks and minerals in Scouting. 

      I set aside what I was doing and showed him some of the rocks I had collected when I was his age.  He was amazed that I still had them.

     I told him that it wasn’t nearly all of them, that I used to collect lots and lots of rocks but I had thrown away most of them and kept only a few of my favorite pieces.  I told him I gave them back to the Earth where they belong and only keep smallish specimens or samples of different rocks or small rocks from a brook, not great big rocks. 

     We talked about my rock collection and about my interest in them even as a child a long time ago when I was just a young girl.  I think most every child reaches a point where they are curious about rocks and minerals and the Earth they are living on.  It is a good time to teach them the importance of taking care of this Earth, being good stewards of our planet and introduce them to geology and archeology and the other Earth Sciences.  They want to know.  It’s a good place to teach a lesson in responsibility and values. 

     He looked at my rocks for a very long time and then putting them back he looked at me and said, “Omma, are you old?  These rocks are very old.” 

     I laughed and told him I was about as old as dirt or close to it.

     A little later that same day I took him hiking along the brook and up the hill where he had found his “gold”.  We didn’t find any gold on our hike except a bit of “fool’s gold,” but we found some nice specimens of the rocks that are in the area and a few that wandered in via the brook.

     There is a lot of ferro-magnesium sandstone in the area and a lot of shale and schist.  Beneath that is granite.  This whole area was once marshland and there is fossil rock here.  A few days later I took him to a park not far from my home where there are fossils to be explored.

     We’ve had a lot of fun rock hounding together and panning for gold.  We’ve had fun exploring the earth and the world of nature around us.  Rock hounding should be fun and if you really want to have fun do it with a kid.  They are curious about everything and ask you questions that really get you thinking and sometimes digging for the right answer.

     I assured my grandson I wasn’t really quite as old as those rocks; that we probably still had a lot of years to explore and have fun together and that is exactly what we are doing.  He’s happy and so am I.

     Since there is no school today I think I’ll give my grandson a call and see if he would like to go with me to Grout Park and check out the fossils and just maybe we’ll do a little rockhounding along the river’s wind or find some other marvelous treasure buried in all that old dirt.