Geology Facts

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Geology is branch of earth science related to the study of solid Earth or the terra firma.

The people who study Geology are called Geologists. They study how rocks, minerals and even mountains form and how they change over time. They also study fossils and Earth’s history and structure of the earth beneath the surface.

Below are some of the facts about geology:

• The word "geology" comes from the two Greek word "ge", meaning earth and "logos", meaning speech.
• Geology is the study of the Earth and what it is made of.
• Majority of geological studies are associated with rocks because it provides records of the history of the Earth.
• To perform their study geologists spend a lot of time outside to collect rock samples.
• The basic tools that geologist use includes the following: rock hammer, hand lens, field notebooks, clipboard, pencil magnet, 1oz Acid Bottle and holder(typically filled with HCl), retractable knife, pocket scriber, assortment of scales and reference materials, field vest, compass and handheld GPS
• There are three major types of rock that geologists study: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.
• Geologists evaluate the minerals that composed the rocks to study all of them.
• The study of the physical material of the Earth dates back to at least to ancient Greece when Theophrastus (372–287 BCE) wrote on stones the work Peri Lithon.
• The geologic time scale includes the history of the Earth.
• Modern scholars, such as Fielding H. Garrison, belived that the origin of the science of geology can be traced to Persia after the Muslim conquests had come to an end.
• The earliest Persian geologists was Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni (973–1048 CE). In one of his work, he hypothesized that the Indian subcontinent was once a sea.
• The word geology was first used by Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603, then by Jean-André Deluc in 1778 and introduced as a fixed term by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in 1779.
• William Smith (1769–1839) drew some of the first geological maps. He also began the process of sorting rock layers by examining the fossils contained in them.
• James Hutton is viewed as the first modern geologist. He presented a paper entitled Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785.
• The first geological map of the U.S. was produced by William Maclure in 1809.
• Radiometric dating allowed the Earth's age to be estimated at two billion years.
• Using geological studies, the Earth's age was approximately known to be 4.5 billion years old.
• Geologist use their knowledge about rocks to find oil and natural gas deposits.
• Geologist use relative dating and absolute dating to determined the age of a specimen.
• Geologist also study rocks from outer space and other planets and moon in our solar system.