Discovery

First-year geology students Rob Parker and Jane Wilson puzzle over the new rock wall exercise at the University of Canterbury. The wall, made of fibreglass, is a simplified version of a typical sequence of Canterbury geology. It also contains a couple of structural problems which allow students to determine at what point faulting occurred and when volcanic activity ceased.

The whole idea was to get the students thinking about rocks in context, says Kerry Swanson of the Department of Geological Sciences. We bombard first-year students with numerous hand specimens of various New Zealand rock types, and expect them to be able to identify most of the minerals and as a consequence put a name to the rock. All this in an environment which said nothing about the real worldrocks occur in sequences and by being able to discriminate one rock unit from another, we are able to decipher the history of that sequence.

Photo by Duncan Shaw-Brown