The house that rocks!

This afternoon myself, four other students and our professor, Iain Stewart, got together to discuss how we can design an activity that secondary school children could do to make rocks, minerals and fossils more interesting to learn. After discussing some initial ideas Iain took us to see an interesting site where the owner had used rock cuttings to decorate his house!

I thought this house displayed a fantastic arrangement of different rocks from igneous ones like granite to a cutting of a mixture of pebbles (called a breccia).

The man who did this came from a town abroad where all of the houses were made of marble, and so he decorated the exterior of his house here with these slabs of rock because he thought they were beautiful, and I totally agree that they are!

Seeing this today reminded me of an article which I read recently about what the public thought about geology. The article referred to "the deep comprehension gap" which argued that the general public have "empty heads waiting to be filled up by scientific knowledge".

I think that it is becoming increasingly important for the public to understand geology. Especially around topics like climate change, hydrocarbon exploration as these effect how we all live and our way of life.

If you want to know more about this here is the name of the paper that I was referring to earlier:

"Earth stories: context and narrative in the communication of popular geoscience" by Iain Stewart and Ted Nield.

Take a read and let me know what you think. If you have any questions or opinions, feel free to comment below. Happy reading!