Wandering in Rock Country

About the Book

What is beyond the beauty of a piece of rock? How does a stand-alone rock come into being naturally? The book presents more than 100 pieces of stories for various rocks, most of which originate from desert, beach, and hillside in Southern California. The author points out the observables with the naked eye and explains their occurrences, putting together the principles of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, which you know as common sense but the application of which you may not yet think about. To name just a few examples: it describes features of nature’s destruction and rejuvenation in sediments and carbonates; it tells the origin of geode, agate, chalcedony, and volcanic bombs; it argues natural carving and piercing of quartz through cyclic water freezing and ice thawing in the desert; it ponders ventifact and varnish as well as lichen (algae/fungi) growth on desert rocks; it considers fracturing and cracking in shaping the rocks by decompression expansion due to erosion and cooling contraction due to tectonic uplifting; and it addresses liquefaction by ground shaking and erratic sediment distribution by ice rafting and climate change.

About the Author

Tien C. Lee is an Emeritus Professor of Geophysics at the University of California, Riverside, California, USA. He was educated as a geologist/geophysicist. He has published peer-reviewed articles in seismology, geoelectricity, hydrogeology, potential field, and terrestrial heat flow. He has also published two books: ‘Applied Mathematics in Hydrogeology (1999)’ and ‘Thus I Came -- short stories that I have been privileged to relate (2017).’ Since his retirement in 2009, he has engaged in writing a book about his rock collections for the general public. It is a show-and-tell book, intended to inspire storytelling, real or imaginary, about commonly available rock specimens for rock hobbyists and enthusiasts as well as aspiring geologists.