Sunday 12 April 2009

Visit to Dudley Museum and Art Gallery - Thursday 9 April


A fascinating day looking at rock through a microscope and 'capturing' it as images onto a lap top. I discovered that I particularly liked the textures of granite and gabbro. Looked up gabbro

and this is what I found:

Gabbro (pronounced /ˈɡæbrəʊ/) refers to a large group of dark, coarse-grained, intrusive igneous rocks chemically equivalent to basalt. The rocks are plutonic, formed when molten magma is trapped beneath the Earth's surface and cools into a crystalline mass.
The vast majority of the Earth's surface is underlain by gabbro within the oceanic crust, produced by basalt magmatism at mid-ocean ridges.

Gabbro reminds me of the kind of image you can create with trace monoprint and some of the granite textures look like wild etchings (probably with quite a lot of open bite...that's a note for any printmakers out there!).


I also looked at the impressive museum collection and read the explanations to better understand the whole story of the Silurian seabed. Had a look through some of the rock and fossil collection and photographed some things.


Graham (Geologist) was really busy and it was an unexpected bonus to witness him look at the rock that some members of the public brought in for identification.
I'm not sure if my pics were saved ok onto the laptop... need to find out!