eating geology Study your food & learn about rocks! Why just eat your food, when you can study it first and learn about the world? ! Not many people know this, but food makes great geological models. Journey to the centre of your breakfast   Why not take a journey to the centre of the Earth at breakfast! Simply crack the top off a boiled egg and the brittle outer shell represents the earth's surface or'Crust', the white is the 'mantle' and the solid yolk the Earth's 'core'. Chocs Away! Bite into a Crunchie Bar and you'll see just how similar it is to a 'dyke' - an injection of molten rock that forces its way into the Earth's surface along cracks. Photo by Professor David L. Reid   Department of Geological Sciences   University of Cape Town   The honeycomb centre looks just like gas bubbles trapped in the rock while the thin, smooth chocolate covering represents the "chilled margin" or where the hot molten rock has cooled rapidly against the colder rocks around it. Spotting such dykes in British rocks is hard as they are usually so old that the original gas bubbles have filled in with secondary minerals (called amygdales). You can also think of your crunchie's 'honeycomb' centre as delicious edible pumice stone! Pumice Images reproduced by permission of the British Geological Survey. © NERC. All rights reserved. IPR/38-7CW.* Wafer-ology! Nibbling a chocolate wafer layer by layer is a good way of understanding how rocks are deposited over time. Imagine each layer of wafer is sand sand and each layer of chocolate is mud and you have a model of 'Sedimentation' or how rocks are lain in 'beds' on top of each other - just as at the beach. Rock layers in a cliff face Photo By John Simmons, © The Geological Society of London www.geolsoc.org.uk   Bryce Canyon Utah USA Photo by Ted Neild, © The Geological Society of London www.geolsoc.org.uk Create a volcanic eruption Finally why not wash it all down with your own volcanic eruption! It's basically what you create when you open a bottle of pop. Your lemonade drink contains carbon dioxide which we normally experience as a gas. Under pressure however, it remains in solution with the rest of the drink. Take the top off and you release the pressure returning it back to a gas sending bubbles everywhere. Same for volcanoes. Gases in the molten rock remain under pressure until they are heated up to such high temperatures they force the volcano to explode releasing millions of tons of rock into the air. Next time your mum tells you off for burping in public you can tell her you were just being Mount Vesuvius! Pictures from radical rocket in Playwith your food. * Visitors to this Web Site are granted permission to access this BGS material and reproduce it for the purposes of academic research, private study and educational or instructive use only. << Go Back