I’ll be honest, I have always thought sedimentary rocks were the most boring. Everybody loves looking at the pretty crystals and banding patterns of igneous and metamorphic rocks, but they don’t really have much of a story to tell besides some wacky temperature and pressure conditions. As I spend more time in Wyoming I feel myself catching feelings for the plain colors and fine grained bedding of the sedimentary rocks. After spent a couple hours analyzing every property of sedimentary formations, a story began unfolding in my head. I could imagine ancient oceans swaying back and forth creating ripples, rivers creating cross-bedding patterns, or winds dumping millions of sand grains into a deposit. Knowing a thing or two about sedimentary rocks helps me understand so much about the ancient world.
Arguably the coolest part of sedimentary rocks is of course, FOSSILS. We have observed countless fossilized organisms from giant sauropod dinosaurs to itty bitty fish scales. Based on what fossils we find as well as the characteristics of the rock that contains them, we can get an understanding of how Earth’s environment has evolved over millions of years. It’s so dope to be able to unravel Earth’s history just by staring at some plain ol’ rocks. Then, observing similar environments and organism interactions gives a deeper understanding to how the ancient world worked.
It’s easy to think that geology and ecology are two separate fields, but in reality the two go hand in hand. The geological and ecology studies that we’ve done in Wyoming have built a more complete picture of how the ancient and modern world works; this couldn’t be done without both. Throughout this trip, studying both fields has fortified what I already knew, but let me see it from a different perspective. It is important to know both in order to understand how our world is and will change.