Rocks & Minerals

I have been collecting rocks since I arrived and it’s very hard to identify what some might be. I was curious if there is a sub section of iNaturalist that is used to identify the geology side of things. If not can where do we make a request?

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iNaturalist doesn’t have anything for rocks and minerals, but I’ve heard good things about an app called Rockd: https://rockd.org/

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I highly recommend https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthisrock/

That said, I’d love to see a geology-based citizen science project similar to iNaturalist someday. That’d be really cool!

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It’s a challenge when geology has already been well mapped across the country, much in great detail.

National Geologic Map Database

Geology is more than just rock & minerals. There are structural features like folds and faults. There’s stratigraphy, mineralogy, paleontology, and on and on.

The best approach is to have something like geocache or waypoint, where someone could log a location of geologic interest, like an interesting outcrop of eclogite, or fossils, or a cliff where a sequence of glacial stratigraphy is exposed.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/geology/ can be a good resource as well.

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