Transcript Rock Cycle

The Rock cycle
The Rock Cycle at a Glance
Melting and Cooling
Imagine you are a rock. You’ve
been sitting where you are for a couple
hundred thousand years, and suddenly,
you’re pushed to the bottom of the crust to
the surface of the mantle.
Things have been hot before, but
never quite this hot. You melt slowly, and
join a mass of magma that’s pooling
beneath the surface of the earth.
Years later, the magma finds its
way to a vault, and cools there slowly over
thousands of years. You begin to be solid
once more.
You form crystals. None of them
are in any particular order, but it’s nice to
have a definite shape once again.
Heat and Pressure
Okay, so you’ve sat in your
magma vault as a piece of granite for
quite a while now. You’re getting
pushed deeper and deeper by rock
forming above you.
The pressure builds, and as you
get lower, so does the heat. It’s
excruciating, but not nearly as much so
as the heat that made you magma.
Over time, the heat and
pressure slowly turn you into
something different.
You’re more compact now,
smoother, and harder. Not to mention
you’ve got a nice shiny finish. Nice.
Erosion and Deposition
Alright, so now you’re a piece
of gneiss (metamorphic granite). Over
a period of thousands of years, you’re
pushed to the surface by rock that’s
forming underneath you.
Once on the surface of the earth,
you suffer a multitude of humilities,
including pieces of you coming off
from rain, water, falls, and being
sandblasted by wind.
Now that you’re pretty much
completely sediment, you deposit in
many different places.
You are compacted by the
pressure of other sediment. You chunk
together, and are now a piece of
sandstone.