Isabel Queay

Wrapping your head round crystallography is a pain until you get to look at dogs and dinosaurs

Highlight of my Lisbon trip, visiting the Carmo Archaeological Museum. This 14th century gothic Church is in incredible condition for the fact it survived the 1755 earthquake that flattened most of the city #Lisbon

Thought I'd share this lovely dyke I found the other day in the Inveraray area. These vertical magma intrusuions are one of my favourite geological features.

On my recent trip to Lisbon, everywhere I looked I would find this gorgeous limestone

I love the small moments like this, finding the bottom of a lava flow. It helps contextualise the rocks around us

Found a somewhat ❤️ shaped mineral on my last trip

Went for a fun camping trip last weekend, of course Agatha the hammer came with me!

Oh yeah, I graduated... And I brought my hammer with me

Have you ever seen a hill that looked out of place? Chances are it could have been a drumlin. Drumlin are teardrop shaped hills formed when glaciers pass through a landscape eroding everything but these areas of hard rock. Fun fact, @UofGlasgow is actually built on one

One of my favourite geological features are accretionary clasts. Made in a couple different settings, one of the most common are eruptions. Ash flung high into the atmosphere mingle with moisture and rock fragments, sticking together and forming little layered spheres of ash.

Such a cool looking specimen, the perfect cozy bed for a fairy. This is malachite with minor azurite from Cerro de Pasco in Peru

In Prague, you can find this spectacular dripstone wall in Wallenstein Palace gardens. Unfortunately this is a man made structure emulating stalactites. Real ones form from the gradual accumulation of precipitate when mineral rich water drips from ceilings of caves for example.

Moment of appreciation for this intraformationally folded siltstone with galena and interlayered sphalerite from Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia 👏👏

One of the funny things about being a geologist is if someone told me I needed to dress expensive for an event, I'd turn up in my field gear 🥾🎒🔨

Under the microscope, even rocks that look bland can be beautiful. And even thin sections that seem bland in plain polarised light can be fantastic in cross polarised light. ✨

These green spheres are tektite, a glass created in impact deposits. They can be found in this mudstone mines in Bristol (UK), but it is believed the crater related to these distal tektite deposits formed ~200 million years ago in Canada 🇨🇦🌠

when we want to know what the ground is made of, we drill down and pull out a core of the rock. Cores can be really long so we chop them into metre long sections. These are then cut lengthways: half is sent to a lab for testing and the other stays to be analysed visually

Another space rock... This is an iron meteorite. No surprises here, it's made of iron 💪 making it pretty heavy to hold but lovely and shiny

I'm holding a meteorite called a pallasite. The crystals are peridotite within an iron matrix. The high Fe content means not only is this heavy to pick up, it's also magnetic (the black object attached is a magnet) 🧲🌠

Ooh, looks like a really cool and fun geologist just added a new reel to their Instagram, maybe you should check it out...you might learn something instagram.com/reel/DEh2S2XsY…