It's All Rocks

I love picking up rocks whenever I see something beautiful or unusual. Does anyone else like picking up rocks?

Lake Ontario has great rocks- every time I go I find new rocks I’ve never seen before.

Last time I found this funny rock… Which I guess is not really a rock. I think it’s actually a piece of sidewalk or something made by humans. 

You can see big chunks and the stuff in between, which seems to include some kind of sand or other ground up rocks. 

When I first picked up one of these up I threw it back in the lake- that’s not a real rock I thought. But the more I spent the day staring at rocks, the more I realized – isn’t that kind of what a lot of these rocks are?


Take these rocks for example, 

They’ve got big bits and small bits in-between. Lots of the rocks in Lake Ontario were made over millions of years of rocks being smashed and crushed into smaller bits, and then over millions of years, those tiny rocks being smushed until they became a brand new rock, made up of all those bits of very old rocks.

And in those old rocks are bits of plants, bits of minerals that are sometimes part of humans and fish and plants and birds, and when we die, the minerals go back into the earth, and over millions of years, some of them become part of rocks.


In fact, there is a very special place in the Sahara[i], an ancient lake bed, now dry, made up of minerals from dead microscopic beings full of phosphorus.

And when this dust gets taken up in the wind, it travels all the way to the Amazon rain forest, where it feeds the plants that are the lungs of the world. It turns out that without the dust from a dry lake bed thousands of miles away, the Amazon would not be as beautiful and lush and full of life as it is today.

Those rocks, that sandy, even a dusty lake bed are like a savings account of minerals that have been part of many different beings in many different forms.

It’s amazing to realize that even our sidewalks and streets and walls will someday become part of the massive rocks underground, or part of the sand on beaches, or first one and then the other[ii]. 

And just as the rocks we find on the beach today are like a savings account, someday all the things we see, all the things we are will go back into that rock savings account to support new forms and new life for millennia into the future.

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[i] "This trans-continental journey of dust is important because of what is in the dust, Yu said. Specifically the dust picked up from the Bodélé Depression in Chad, an ancient lake bed where rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms are loaded with phosphorus. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant proteins and growth, which the Amazon rain forest depends on in order to flourish."
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazons-plants/

[ii] My geologist friend Mo says this era is called the “Anthropocene” which refers to this time period in which humans directly impact the geologic record. She adds "You can imagine a time millions of years from now when the robots are studying the sedimentary strata and they find the first appearance of a coke bottle - that’s the beginning of the Anthropocene."