Sedimentation and tectonics, basin initiation and evolution, in ten hundred words

Last week was a busy one for me. It was the first week of classes, but I was also wrapping up an independent study from the previous semester with a presentation to my research group and a paper. Plus I was finalizing an abstract and hosting a visiting prospective grad student.

In the midst of all the craziness, I took time out to try my hand at describing what I do with the Up-Goer Five challenge: describing what I do using only the thousand most common words in the English language. Here's what I came up with:

The places where rocks are stored in the ground are made when big blocks push together or pull away from each other. I study how the blocks move and how all this moving around controls the places where the rocks are stored.

It's short and to the point. Maybe with more time I could have come up with a more creative way to describe studying sedimentation and tectonics as related to sedimentary basin initiation and evolution.

The original call for the geotweep community to try this came from Anne Jefferson over at Highly Allochthonous, and she and co-blogger Chris Rowan did an amazing job organizing the results into a "Ten Hundred Words of Science" tumblr. Check it out, and if you haven't done so already, contribute your own description of what you do!