#Geologist #Hermitcraft
Let’s go back to episode 19 of hermitcraft season 8. i was in the process of building up the lake on the top of my mountain and i jokingly asked for the help of geologists i definitely was not expecting any geologist to actually get in touch but upon opening
My inbox later that evening i saw i had an email from someone at the university of portsmouth saying that they knew a geology lecturer who would be perfect to talk to hello my name is catherine motrum and i’m a lecturer in geology at the university of portsmouth so with an official geologist
Acquired it was now time to ask the question that was probably on a decent number of your minds what is geology that is a good question thank you geology is really the study of the earth beneath our feet the earth has been around for 4.5 billion years so there is
A long time for us to um explore and understand and we’re really looking at key processes that have shaped our planet i think to be a good geologist you have to have quite a wild imagination because we’re essentially piecing together this incredibly long earth history with only very small bits
Of evidence so we’re sort of like detectives but most of the evidence missing and then we have to kind of fill in the gaps and do a little bit of arm waving in between so now that we’ve been introduced to catherine and also introduced to geology it is now time to
Introduce the idea for this video catherine is going to take a look at all of the structures that we have created in the bottom area and she is going to discuss how realistic they actually are from my armchair to scar’s peaks pulse rolling hills and as a nice bonus we’re even
Going to touch on b double o’s mountain and as the least experienced builder of the bunch i can’t say i’m not nervous and when i initially saw this image it really reminds me of places where you’ve got limestone on earth like when i see that it just says limestone to me so
Limestone is a very common sedimentary rock so sedimentary rocks lay down usually in like the ocean in the offshore area where there might be reefs if we’re looking at that sea where we have sediments kind of raining down in the sea eventually when that turns into rock so imagine that lovely image i’ve
Just pictured for you that turns into rock that is a limestone and when they weather they weather into often deep gorges so when i look at this mumbo picture i can see those deep gorges i can see that you’ve got that river underneath you’re going down under that
Kind of natural arch that is exactly what we see in lime stone topography and it kind of reminds me a bit of places like in china for instance because again you’ve got lots of limestone and this is geology but it’s also highlighting how geology is not only about understanding the rocks but the
Interaction with the surface processes so with weathering with rain with rivers and understanding the topography is about that interaction between the climate and the rocks at this point i was feeling pretty confident i mean catherine just confirmed that my structure this mountain right here could potentially exist in real life and it
Exhibits a lot of the characteristics that we see in limestone rock formations which of course i was totally aware of and very conscious of as i was building it so with this newfound confidence it was now time to ask the dreaded question what is wrong with it i think it’s a bit
Strange that you’ve got a waterfall essentially coming from what seems to be like a freestanding block so you think about like the logistics of that i just don’t know how is that water getting up there how’s it going up there and coming down like you need an a whole
Mountain range behind it feeding that waterfall basically so that would be my main uh criticism is that i’m not sure that that waterfall is feasible way bigger mountain range yes yes it needs to be connected it can’t just be like isolated or you could have that but
Just don’t have the waterfall now it’s worth mentioning that this was filmed before i added the temple on top so now it doesn’t need to make sense scientifically because this temple is magical and when something is magical it doesn’t have to be scientific so with my giant armchair mountain just about
Passing the reality test now it was time to look at scars peaks they are incredibly pointy like really really really pointy so i’m an expert in himalayan geology i’ve been out to the himalayas many many times and being up in the high mountains really high up you do get extremely
Pointy rocks so a formation like this is possible if not a little bit exaggerated but how would something like this actually fall so on the very highest mountains in the himalayas we have these um sedimentary rocks that were deposited under the sea essentially then in the middle we have these hot squishy rocks
That have been incredibly deformed they’re all part of the indian crust so part of the indian continent when that collision happened they were subducted so they’re taken down into the mantle or at least into the lower crust where they were heated up squashed um and during that process we have what we call
Metamorphism and metamorphism is when we take one mineral and we cook it up a bit and we turn it into something else so it’s a little bit like baking but you put in your raw ingredients which are generally chemical elements we cook them up a bit and then we make some other
Minerals so you can see these really shiny ones very common minerals that we get in metamorphic rocks they’re called micas when we look at mountains like scar i would imagine there would be metamorphic rocks like this rocks that have been taken down into the crust they’ve been compressed they’ve been
Down to maybe 20 or 30 kilometers underneath the surface they’ve been heated up they even might start melting they’ve been brought back up due to tectonic processes all of these rocks have been through it really have so your rocks on scar are going to be similar to these what an incredibly
Traumatic and very painful journey these rocks have gone through i will never complain about terraforming in minecraft again i mean sure it’s painful and it takes me many days and i really struggle with it but at least i don’t have to go 20 kilometers below the surface of the
Earth then end up in the mantle and then get pushed upwards with great force that sounds awful it really is a very dynamic process building a mountain belt um i’ve got some i do some diagrams here of um some cross sections through the alps these are actually really old
Diagrams but i just think they’re so beautiful um actually these were drawn before we knew about plate tectonics so they knew about the structure of these mountain belts that they’ve got these incredibly complicated folds so like this one this is an example of a fold areas for improvement i would say in
Your minecraft world is you could have some folds which scar has now done the absolute madman but my big question has always been could these builds actually exist next to one another they absolutely could exist together yes that is excellent news because it’s so small scale oh oh okay
Because they’re really they’re really small mountains they’re tiny mountains this is just a small tiny building block of what would be a giant mountain belt like the himalayas and you’ve got so much variation in that so you could easily get two different completely different rock types right next to each
Other the fact that you’ve got extreme topography in both your bits and mountains make sense that they’re next to each other because they would form in a place where you had potentially high uplift high erosion rates so this definitely reminds me of somewhere in the himalayas or china or southeast asia
Or somewhere like that that’s what it looks like so with the mumbo green and scar mountain range being confirmed as accurate because it’s so tiny now it’s time to swiftly move on my initial reaction looking at pearl um so we’ve got these very kind of orangey rocks and we’ve got this lovely
Temple on the top to me these rocks kind of look like a some kind of red sandstone we have a rock called the old red sandstone which is old and red and the sandstone as the name would suggest that rock was formed of eroded material from an ancient mountain belt
So when we have mountains we have erosion forming the topography but then that is basically chipping away at all the rock and turning it into fine-grained sediments that then get washed out to sea or washed out into a river washed out into a lake washed out somewhere and they then form their own
Rock so you’ve got a rock made of an eroded mountain belt so little bits of basically eaten up mountain belt which are then made into a new rock yeah perhaps your pearl landscape could be something like that it could be some sediments that were eroded potentially
From from scar i can see that you know you’ve got these next to scar so maybe scar was eroded and then that’s being dumped into a nearby sedimentary basin and maybe that’s got consumed by the mountain bout like the shewalix like in the himalaya so we could potentially make a
Geological story here i honestly think that one might be the most interesting of the bunch pearls mountain has been formed by the runoff of sediment from scars mountain geology is awesome rocks are awesome catherine is awesome so with the geological story now told for the boaten village i think it’s time we go
Further afield a short trip across the surfer takes us to the rather gorgeous mountain of bw yeah to me this looks a lot more realistic actually i’m not sure we need to look at bw’s mountain i think we should end the video here because you’ve not got those like extreme topographic
Um you know valleys incisions gorgeous but as i said do exist on earth today but when particularly when we look at perhaps a mountain in the uk or somewhere where we’ve got older rocks where they’ve had time to erode slowly over millions of years you do get more
Of this rounded style of topography this reminds me of yeah we could be in scotland so i guess that confirms what we kind of already knew b double o’s mountain is by far the most realistic and as you can see fifi is overjoyed i really just want to thank catherine and
The university of portsmouth for giving up their time for me to come in and film it is hugely appreciated and i had so much fun i definitely left that filming session wanting to learn more about geology and if you’re in the same boat then catherine has some tips for you go
And just find any exposed rocks if you don’t live by the by the ocean don’t worry there’s probably some rocks in your local park anywhere there’s going to be materials under your feet and pick that up and ideally put it you know very close to your face and have a look at it
Look at what it is made of um make your own observations be curious and if you want to find out okay well what is my rock you can go on to websites such as the geological society of london is our biggest governing body in the uk and they have got some really
Excellent resources about rocks and minerals and then you could also just if you really curious about something and you want to know have i found like a really cool fossil you could just email your local university there’s people like me sat in a university near you who love rocks and
Minerals and we love getting images sent to us quite often of i found this rock do you think it’s cool the young people of today they are very good at finding information but look on youtube type in geology minerals volcanoes earthquakes and look at some of these websites where
You can find some really key information about activities and how you can develop your geological knowledge further one extra thing that might be of interest is various different minecraft geology websites there are links to those down in the description as well as all of the other things that catherine has talked
About and i also just want to say a huge thank you to catherine and the university of portsmouth for allowing me to film it was a lot of fun i hope you enjoyed and i’ll catch you in the next one see ya
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