Abstract

A long time ago, the world was much colder than it was today. When the world was that cold, places that right now have no ice actually had a lot of ice - some places were covered in it, but some places only had ice in the ground. When that ice in the ground turned into water, the water would move down low and take the ground with it. This moving makes the rocks and the ground look really weird, and even weirder is that we can see these funny rocks and ground today in places where it is not cold at all. That tells me that ice in the ground is very good at moving rocks, but things living today like trees and animals are not. What's more, I think that the weird ground and rocks have been there for a really long time. I can even use cool types of the world's building blocks to tell me just how old these rocks are. These types of building blocks are made at the top of the ground, so if we read how many of the building blocks there are in the ground and in the rocks, we can know how long they have been there and how long they have been far under the ground. Maybe if we learn about cold rocks and cold ground that happened long ago, we can guess what will happen when the cold rocks and cold ground that happen today turn to hot and water.

Citation

Joanmarie Del Vecchio* (2018): Reading rocks and ground that once were cold but now are not. Abstract ED21B-02 presented at 2018 AGU Fall Meeting, Washington, D.C., 10-14.

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.