Rock Of Ages

   POSTMODERN GEOLOGY 102 A

Petrology for Deconstruction Majors 

Trinitite
The first rock to form during  the Postmodern epoch.

This violet to green, obsidian-like lithic, fused from the White Sands of southern New Mexico is an un-natural glass  emplaced in a shallow anticline , with a tritium age of 6.1 milli-eons, a few weeks older than the Terminal Showa formation of the Hiroshima district in southern Japan.

Younger deposits are known to exist in Kazakhstan ,the Lop basin in China, and synclines in India and Pakistan. A calcian variety has been reported from some recently vanished French atolls.  All are highly enriched in transuranic elements and look far older than their years.

Saddamite
More mafic than  Maccadamite,this high-temperature no pressure  metamorphic exists atop the holocene tar sands of Kuwait. Consisting of quartz grains in a matrix of carbon black with fossil impressions of boots, coots and camel tracks,  its petrogenesis defies explanation.

High porphyrin levels suggest a marine Cretaceous origin ,but no natural or commercial explanation exists for the infernal thermal fluxes required to pyrolize so much carbon There are no signs of natural catastrophe or nuclear winter in the vicinity.

Cryabase

Foundation stone of the infant science of neopetrology , cryabase is the only  terrestrial rock consisting entirely of condensed air. This paragon of igneous minimalism  contains native oxygen and nitrogen,  argon snowflakes  ,and  minute crystals of  Freon, neon, and radon.

Cryabase occurs as aircicles and frost-like masses surrounding liquid hydrogen tanks. Much feared by Space Shuttle pilots ,it is difficult to collect as geologists picks embrittle severely at frozen air temperatures. Attempting  to lick field samples is highly inadvisable.

Saganite
Phenomenally cold and dark variety of cryabase. A report in Science in 1983 stated that minute amounts in atmospheric suspension can lower global temperatures below freezing for 40 days and 40 nights, but the still unpublished type specimen seems to have reverted to apocryphite.

Saganite seems structurally related to Imhofite and the War of the Worlds symplectite  near Grovers Mills N.J . Immense deposits reportedly exist beneath the Enron gas dome and the Busang Borneo  megagold strike, but none has been offered for sale . Distinguishing features : highly refractory at a distance; melts under examination.

The Ground Zero Gneiss
Thus far known only from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon basement,  this so unique migmatite exhibits a portlandite matrix with corrugated layers of  galvanized iron , asbestos fibers , and exotic nickel alloy  laths whose grain structure suggests hot deformation. Zones of heavily mylonized gypsum contain mica-like books of carbonaceous schist with  angular markings. Unlike exsolved  graphic granites, which resemble garbled cuneiform, the GZG graphitites are highly legible, and appear to pertain to world trade.

The Tora Bora Metapeltites
Cave entrance exposures near the Waziristan-Pakistan syntaxis have yielded fugitive traces of these rare and much sought after products of repeated shock and awe.

Its distinuishing features are Seismic deformation and  clasts of lead, depleted uranium , kevlar and boron carbide.  Analytical  petrologists  hope to collect the $50 million reward offered for a specimen showing plastically deformed traces of the elusive  organic phase binladenite  in amounts sufficient for positive DNA identification.

Comments

[don warner saklad]

by Beth Daley
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/03/06/us_to_test_local_wells_for_traces_of_uranium/