ROCK LAYERS

Rocks
• are naturally formed, non-living earth
materials.
• are made of collections of mineral grains
that are held together in a hard, solid
mass.
• are identified primarily by the minerals
they contain and by their texture.
Clastic Sedimentary Rocks
• are made of pieces of rock or mineral
grains that have been broken from
preexisting rock.
• are conglomerate, shale, breccia, gray and
red sandstone, siltstone, and greywacke
Texture
• is a description of the size, shape, and
arrangement of mineral grains.
What are examples of sedimentary rocks
with their uses?
• Oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium, our major
energy resources, are formed in and come from
sedimentary rocks.
• Sand and gravel for construction come from
sediment.
• Sandstone and limestone are used for building
stone.
• Rock gypsum is used to make plaster.
What are examples of sedimentary rocks with
their uses?
• Limestone is used to make cement.
• Salt is used for flavoring.
• Phosphate-bearing sedimentary rocks are
used for fertilizer.
• Quartz sand is used to make glass.
Other Classifications of Sedimentary Rocks
1. Detrimental sedimentary rocks – rocks
that come from weathered rocks such as
igneous rocks.

2. Chemical sedimentary rocks – rocks that

come from soluble materials produced
largely by chemical weathering.
Stratification (or layering) not only occurs in most
sedimentary rocks but also in those igneous rocks formed at
the earth’s surface.

The strata (or layers) range from several millimeters to many

meters in thickness and vary greatly in shape.
How are rock layers formed?
• Stratified rocks, also known as derivatives
rock, may be fragmental or crystalline.
Stratigraphy
• It is the branch of geology that deals with
the description, correlation, and
interpretation of stratified sediments and
stratified rocks on and within the Earth.
Stratification
• occurs as a result of a density differential
between two water layers and can arise as
a result of the differences in salinity,
temperature, or a combination of both.
How are stratified rocks formed?
• deposition of particles of similar size
• certain increase or decrease in transportation
energy
• The sedimentary rocks are formed by the
deposition (followed by consolidation) of
sediments (ie broken, rock particles) under
water bodies such as rivers, depositional
basins and seas.
HOW OLD IS MOTHER EARTH?????
a. The Earth has a very long history — 4.6
billions of years of history.
b. The age of the Earth is based from the
radioactive isotopic dating of meteorites.
c. The oldest dated rock from the Earth is
only ~3.8 billion years old.
DIFFERENT METHODS OF DETERMINING THE AGE OF
STRATIFIED ROCKS

1. Rock
• naturally occurring and coherent
aggregate of one or more minerals.
2. Stratification
• means arranging something, or something
that has been arranged, into categories.
• a system or formation of layers, classes, or
categories. Stratification is used to describe
a particular way of arranging seeds while
planting, as well as the geological layers of
rocks.
3. Stratigraphy
• the branch of geology concerned with the
order and relative position of strata and
their relationship to the geological time
scale.
• the analysis of the order and position of
layers of archaeological remains.
• the structure of a particular set of strata.
Absolute and
relative dating
methods have been
used to establish
tentative
chronologies for
rock art.
➢ Absolute dating methods that rely on
specialized laboratory analyses such as
dendrochronology, radiocarbon, and
luminescence measurements are available
to historical archaeologists.
➢ Isotopes- atoms of the same element that
have the same number of protons but different
numbers of neutrons.
Radioactive decay
• Radioactive isotopes tend to break down into
stable isotopes of the same or other elements.
Dating Rocks — How Does It Work?
• In radioactive decay, an unstable radioactive
isotope of one element breaks down into a
stable isotope.

Parent isotope
• The unstable radioactive isotope.
• Daughter isotope
-The stable isotope
produced by the
radioactive decay of
the parent isotope.
Radiometric dating
• Determining the absolute age of a
sample, based on the ratio of parent
material to daughter material.
Half-life
• the time needed for half of a sample of a
radioactive substance to undergo radioactive
decay.
Types of Radiometric Dating
Potassium-Argon Method
• Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3
billion years, and it decays leaving a
daughter material of argon.
Types of Radiometric Dating
Uranium-Lead Method
• Uranium-238 is a radioactive isotope with
a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
• Uranium-238 decays in a series of steps to
lead-206.
Types of Radiometric Dating
Rubidium-Strontium Method
• The unstable parent isotope rubidium-87
forms a stable daughter isotope strontium-
87.
• The half-life of rubidium-87 is 49 billion
years
Types of Radiometric Dating
Carbon-14 Method
• Carbon is normally found in three forms, the
stable isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13, and
the radioactive isotope carbon-14.
• Living plants and animals contain a constant
ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
• The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years.
How Old is That Rock?
Absolute age
• measuring the amount of certain radioactive
elements in the rock .