Now that the semester is winding down and the cold weather has set in, I find my mind wandering back to the beginning of the academic year. It seems like it was years ago, not months, that our Mineralogy class visited Zollinger’s quarry.
2010 Mineralogy class at Zollinger's Quarry in late September.
It didn’t take long for students to discover the beautifully formed gypsum crystals that littered the ground.
From left to right, Will Cary, Matt Peppers, and Kevin Silver caught in the act of discovering the gypsum.
Truly, these are beautiful gypsum crystals.
In fact, next week we’re using some of the crystals that we collected in our discussion of the thermodynamics of crystal nucleation and growth.
Of course, the minerals weren’t the only stars of the show. The students were excited to find these incredible mud cracks with preserved rain drops – comparable to these mud cracks that a fellow geologist at Mountain Beltway observed in Turkey.
Mud cracks and preserved rain drops in Zollinger's Quarry.