Can You Dig It?

We attended the Florida Museum of Natural History's annual "Can You Dig It" event tonight. We were able to see the live demonstrations of:

• an erupting volcano (talking about pyroclastic clouds as well as comparisons of the Pompeii eruption and the Mount St. Helens eruption);
• "magic rocks" which glow under UV lights (we got to see things glow orange, green, pink, and white) based on their component elements (like calcium);
• flint knapping, where master flint knapper Tom Nutter was making stone arrow heads the "modern way", and then discussed with us how it would have been done by Native Americans;
• the work of water and how it shapes Earth's surface and subsurface, including ridges and rivers and canyons;
• and the ground water system, complete with a 3-D model of a cube of earth down through to the deepest aquifer, and also a water model to show how pollution can get from contaminated sewers, septic tanks, and similar into our drinking water supplies.
  

We also explored mineral hardness and how a rock with a hardness less than 2.5 (which is the hardness of our nails) would flake when scraped, got to feel different stalagmites and stalactites, looked at shavings of different "rocks" under the microscope (including granite and limestone), and saw the gem cutting process (from mining the minerals to extracting the "pretty part" to shaping to setting for jewelry). We also briefly participated in the "fossil dig", but were less than impressed with it, as it was just a sandbox with different mineral rocks thrown in there -- there was no "excavating" required.