Hello, my name is Bob the Metamorphic Rock.

I am a piece of quartzite and I am one of the many rocks used as track ballast on a railroad track, but if you think I was always that way, you are wrong. I used to be magma in the mantle. Then one day, an active volcano in the Cascade Range erupted and brought me to the surface. When I cooled, I became Bob the Igneous Rock, a big chunk of rhyolite. During my days as rhyolite, I was made up mostly of quartz, alkali, feldspar and plagioclase. I was white in color and had black specs everywhere. Over millions of years, wind and rain eroded me until I was the size of a pebble. The tiny particles that got detached from me got deposited in a river. After thousands of years, I mixed with other sediments in the river. After many other layers of sediments got piled on top of me, I started getting squashed under all the weight. Then, a few million years later, the minerals in the rocks started to dissolve in

the water. When I was glued together with other sediments around me, I turned into Bob the Sedimentary Rock and I was a piece of shale. One thousand years had passed and nothing special had happened to me yet. Then one day, a guy picked me up and took me to his boat. When his boat set sail, he threw me off board along with some other rocks he had found. After I sank to the bottom, sand and other rocks piled on top of me. I happened to be quite near a fault line. When the oceanic plate I was on started colliding with the neighboring one. The result was lots and lots of pressure. As I was being compressed, a pocket of magma rose out of the mantle and heated me up. When a few million years had passed, I became known as Bob the Metamorphic Rock and I was a slab of slate. One day, a manufacturer of chalkboards picked me up and sent me to their factory. Inside the factory, I was cut into a rectangle and

placed inside a wooden frame. Then I was put in a box and shipped overseas to a far off country where I was bought for a classroom. I didnt stay in a classroom for long. One day a student was practicing his writing and the teacher came and said it was bad. The student started crying and ran away from school. Outside, he threw me into an ocean and walked away. After I lay at the bottom of the sea for a few years, a volcano erupted and I was in the middle of it. The lava melted me and I mixed with the lava around me, mostly melted sand. Once I cooled, I became known as Bob the Igneous Rock. The form of rock I was turned out to be basalt. One day, I got washed up onto shore. Then a rock collector picked me up and took me to a river. He decided that he didnt like me, so he threw me into the river. After I got thrown into the lake, the currents of the river started to wear away bit and pieces of me until

most of me was little pieces of sand being carried away by the current. The little pieces of me soon mixed with other sediments being carried along by the river. When the river ended at a lake, I was dumped in it along with all the other sediments I had joined in the river. Over time, I started getting slowly being pressed down because of the other sediments piling up on top of me. Over millions of years, the minerals from the sediment started dissolving in the water. These minerals started leaking into the spaces between the sediment particles. Slowly, the minerals crystallized and glued all of the sediments around me together. On that day, I became known as, Bob the Sedimentary Rock, the type of rock I turned into was sandstone. The landscape changed dramatically since I became a chunk of sandstone. The lake evaporated and I was in a train tunnel under a mountain. Suddenly there was an earthquake and the tunnel collapsed. Unfortunately, I started sinking. I started getting pressed

together by all the pressure. Then, the heat from the mantle heated me up that I turned from sandstone to what I am now, quartzite. Later, I was picked up along with many other pieces of quartzite and used as track ballast. And that is what I am today, a piece of track ballast under a railroad track. I will probably be here for another thousand years, but my adventures are far from over.