Can you take the top layer off? So cool! Awesome. sedimentary rock, man. hey, welcome
to the scope of science. I'm Kurtis Baute. now a few months ago I did a video on
erosion while I was in the desert basically about how rocks can die,
because over time rocks can break apart and turn into sand or smaller pebbles or
other debris. Now, what is crazy about that is that yes I'm referring to rocks
"dying" like they have a life but we actually refer to them as having a life
cycle. So today I'm going to talk about sedimentary rock which is one of those
phases of that life cycle and one way in which a rock can be born. So, sedimentary
rock. Sedimentary rocks make up about three-quarters of all of the rocks on
Earth's surface they're very common and they're actually very interesting and
very useful for science they're my favorite type of rock though I do plan
hopefully on making videos about the other two categories of rocks in the
future upload cards to them when I get to it the first step in the formation of
a new sedimentary rock is that an old rock needs to die so first a rock needs
to either a road or somehow break apart become small enough that it can form
into a sedimentary rock so once you have these or roaded bits they need to
collect some where they need to what we call deposit now what's crazy is that
this process happens so much, and - in my old video as showed just how much
sand can accumulate from rocks eroding. And it can happen on such a scale that
this deposited mass all of that debris can actually add up to a lot of weight
and it's that weight that allows for the next step to happen compaction which is
when you have all of this debris weighing in and pressing against itself
until all of the little gaps are gone. Until all the little gaps have been
filled in with more of that debris until it's basically crushing itself into a
new rock, and that is the last step lithification Lithification is a crazy word and it is a crazy process it's when you have two
rocks that are close together they're compacted together and a chemical bond
forms between them that allows for them to become one solid mass one new
sedimentary rock sedimentary rocks take on all types of forms here in Vancouver
we have a very very soft sandstone that you can break and we find it all on the
coast you can find different colors of sedimentary rock like the ones that I
found in a desert you can find rocks that are almost like pavement like
cement because they've been formed from very very big pebbles or very coarse
debris while ago I actually found a piece of wood that had been petrified
that had been turned into a sedimentary rock it's pretty crazy you can actually
see where the old cells were and where the fibers are in the plant itself which
is freaking awesome now because of how sedimentary rocks form and the fact that
they do so very gradually you actually end up with a history of the earth a
record that's millions of years old hundreds of millions of years ago there
could have been very fine grains of sand that's here in blue and then you had
coarser sand here and then you had sand that had a lot of iron in it and is
invisible I won't use orange anymore and then you might have a different type of
sand or maybe these are just a layer of pebbles and now we're back to the
fine-grained sand that we started with now this record tells you what different
sections of the Earth's history was and as you dig further down on the ground as
you dig further deeper into the ground you go further back in time you might
find these fossils here and you might find other fossils like a claw here and
you know that these fossils are older than these fossils by the way I've tried
to draw trilobite here so you know that the trial of mites are older than the
dinosaur fossils because they're deeper down because that it's taken longer for
all this sediment to build up on top of them
now you might have noticed I've been drawing fossils because all fossils are
in sedimentary rock basically you have a life form that decays inside of a bunch
of sand or debris and the process of lithification will weak I mean it's
called petrification in this case happens basically their bones get coated
in some sort of a mineral and then over time that becomes a rock and over time
each of their cells is slowly replaced by that mineralization is slowly
replaced by minerals until you end up with a solid stone that no longer has
their the original bone or the original plant material in it but is a solid rock
in the shape of it that's how fossils are made so we're an Indian Creek Utah
everywhere you look you see sedimentary rock
these layers and layers of sediment built up over a long period of time and
eventually press together into rock this rock actually tells a story it's kind of
amazing because if you look at it as you expect it is settled sediment settling
by the force of gravity which means that the layers are flat
but I'll show you some places where the layers aren't flat in California you can
see these little mountains these little Hills have horizontal lines on them
running across now those lines are formed from sedimentary rock so layering
and layering of rock but it layers flat with gravity horizontal to the rest of
the earth and those lines are sloped on an angle which is because they were
lifted out of the ground and then lifted more on this side than on this side to
detect tonic plate activity so yeah sedimentary rock showing the process
of motion of the earth like tectonics at work I think sedimentary rocks are
really cool and I hope I've piqued your interest in them I'm making more geology
videos and other general science videos so if you like this kind of content
please like this and consider subscribing if you want to see more and
thanks so much for watching. If we press it hard enough it'll become a
single piece again :P