Geology Merit Badge Trail     Introduction Plate Tectonics Time Scale and History Formation of the Ouachitas Faults and Earthquakes Fossils Geologic features Environmental Geology Fossil Fuels Careers

Introducing Geology, or How the World Was Made LIKE ANY OTHER subject, geology can be made fun or boring, depending on how it is presented. Several junior high students have told us so! This chapter is designed to tell the stories of the rocks, in a not-so-technical way, and if you learn some basic principles of geology too, so much the better. "Geo" means the earth, and "logy" is the science of. Thus geology is the science of the earth, and the geologist is the scientist. Geology is different than rockhounding, because it involves research and understanding, much more than the finding and collecting we enjoy when rockhounding. But the two are related, and the more you know about one, the better your understanding of both. Arkansas is a great place to be either a geologist or a rockhound (or both) because the interesting rock formations of our place gave rise to the minerals here! In this chapter you will find (several articles are being written) 1. Our Changing Earth - Plate Tectonics: a continental dance and how scientists figured out that yes, that hump on South America did fit into the hole in the side of Africa 2. The Geologic Time Scale and a Summary of geologic history in Arkansas, telling what has been going on for all these millions of years 3. How the Ouachita Mountains formed - the Big Bang from an approaching continent's point of view 4. Your Fault, My Fault, and the New Madrid Fault- Earthquakes, and the story of New Madrid, where the largest earthquake in recorded history happened. It was so big the Mississippi River ran backwards! 5. The Stories Fossils Tell 6. A Few Pictures, showing features like anticlines, synclines and folds 7. How Geology affects the Environment, a guest article by John Hopkins, because Boy Scouts need to know 8. Geology and sources of energy - Coal, oil, gas, uranium: if you can't grow it, you have to mine it 9. Careers in Geology- The different disciplines and subspecialties of geology   Ch 5 , page 1 Contact the authors of Rockhounding Arkansas revised January 1999 ©Rockhounding Arkansas 1998 http://rockhoundingAR.com