Find a rock (or mineral)This week find a rock or mineral (look in your yard, or a park or ...? No need to buy one!). Describe it (will probably take a paragraph). What is it? Where did you find it? If it is a rock, what minerals are found inside it? If you don't know, realize that local rocks are typically igneous or metamorphic and use the rock keys in the lecture slides to figure out what type of rock it is. Describe the texture (can you see crystals or not). How do you think it formed? must include a picture of it.Do you have a similar rock or mineral? Do you have a suggestion for them about how their rock may have formed?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Instructor example post: I found my rock at a garage sale next door when I was five years old. I saw it and knew I had to have it. I even broke my piggy bank and had to borrow from my sister. The guy selling it wanted 5 dollars for it, which now seems like a bargain, but back then was a lot! It was beautiful, with large purple crystals inside a curved pocket of grey rock. I now know it is a geode filled with quartz crystals. Extra magnesium ions which found their way into the quartz crystal lattice are what make the quartz purple, also known as amethyst, which happens to be my birthstone . Most geodes of this type come from Brazil. Originally basalt flowed from a volcano over the surface of the earth. Various types of gases trapped inside the basalt eventually seeped out, leaving behind empty pockets in the rock, called vesicles. As the basalt weathered at the surface, water passed through, carrying and depositing minute amounts of quartz inside the vesicles, until the vesicle filled up with crystals. After a longer period of time the balls of quartz weathered out of the basalt and persisted since quartz is harder than the basalt it was trapped in. Then someone found it and broke it open, revealing the crystals inside! I still have my rock, and bring it to show my students: finding it helped point me down the path to becoming a geologist! (OK so the picture attached is not actually mine, but it is similar...)----------------------------------------------------------------------------Thank You.