October 19, 2011
Posted by Evelyn Mervine
When relatives come to into town for a wedding, geologists show them…
….migmatite!
The Cape Point Migmatite. I look slightly more excited than our guest.
….and a xenolith!
Malmesbury siltsone xenolith in Cape Point Granite.
Wonder if the rest of our guests will “appreciate” such geologic sites.
Evelyn is a geologist, writer, traveler, and aspiring polyglot. She has undergraduate degrees in Earth Sciences and Arabic Language & Literature from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Marine Geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program. She currently works in industry.
I think he would rather eat some seafood or see the penguins….
Hey! I wasn’t that bad. Was really blown away at the amount of information you could cram into my small brain in two days time. I think without trying hard I’ll even spell Migmatite right…… Okay I copy and pasted it LOL, that is where my cleverness comes in =)
Make sure you take the visitors up Table Mountain on a cloudy day, so that the views don’t distract the relatives from the beautiful sandstones.
My life, for the last 30 years or so, has been Computers. Almost totally. So it shows to go ya how much you have influenced my life since I’ve been reading you, that I KNEW what a “siltstone xenolith” was WITHOUT GOING TO GOOGLE to look it up.
[…] one above, can be observed in the granite boulders at Clifton Beach. I took the above picture when we took my husband’s cousin around to look at a few geological sites in the Cape Town area .There is a 5-Rand South African coin for scale in the picture; this coin is slightly smaller than […]
[…] Evelyn Mervine and her husband Jackie Gauntlett, when we flew into Cape Town in December. They have a habit of bringing out-of-towners to this spot to show off the rocks. Chris Rowan of the blog Highly Allochthonous has been there too, and offers a direct snippet of […]