The Rock cycle

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The Rock cycle
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The Rock Cycle at a Glance
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Melting and Cooling
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Imagine you are a rock. Youve been sitting
where you are for a couple hundred thousand
years, and suddenly, youre pushed to the bottom
of the crust to the surface of the
mantle. Things have been hot before, but never
quite this hot. You melt slowly, and join a mass
of magma thats pooling beneath the surface of
the earth. Years later, the magma finds its way
to a vault, and cools there slowly over thousands
of years. You begin to be solid once more. You
form crystals. None of them are in any
particular order, but its nice to have a
definite shape once again.
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Heat and Pressure
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Okay, so youve sat in your magma vault as a
piece of granite for quite a while now. Youre
getting pushed deeper and deeper by rock forming
above you. The pressure builds, and as you get
lower, so does the heat. Its excruciating, but
not nearly as much so as the heat that made you
magma. Over time, the heat and pressure slowly
turn you into something different. Youre more
compact now, smoother, and harder. Not to
mention youve got a nice shiny finish. Nice.
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Erosion and Deposition
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Alright, so now youre a piece of gneiss
(metamorphic granite). Over a period of
thousands of years, youre pushed to the surface
by rock thats forming underneath you. Once on
the surface of the earth, you suffer a multitude
of humilities, including pieces of you coming off
from rain, water, falls, and being sandblasted by
wind. Now that youre pretty much completely
sediment, you deposit in many different
places. You are compacted by the pressure of
other sediment. You chunk together, and are now
a piece of sandstone.