Is there a mineral equivalent of the order of life?

January 23, 2009 11:21 AM

I'm working on a college graphics project in which I have to make 30 images with the theme Animal Vegetable Mineral. My plan is to draw a picture of an animal eating a plant while standing on a rock or something, then to "zoom in" to the animal 9 times, illustrating the organism, organ system, organ etc. all the way down to quark. Then I want zoom out from the quark, this time illustrating the equivalent stages for the plant and when I get back to the original picture I want to zoom in to the rock. I found this list of the order of life but I don't know what the equivalent list would be for the rock.
posted by Andy Harwood to science & nature (6 comments total)

This may not be relevant at all, but you might be interested in this video for some inspiration.
posted by goHermGO at 11:35 AM on January 23

I am not a geologist. Still, I don't think there are any equivalents past the crystal structure of rock. I think you'd have to bend the concept towards the history of formative steps that may have caused changes in the rock's structure.

Or do a joke about it and design little rock "organs" and such, then have the rock's eyes open and "chomp" eat the animal like an Angler fish would...then spit out the plant.
posted by bonobothegreat at 11:44 AM on January 23

I doubt there is an established thing like this (that order of life list is pretty made up and arbitrary rather than really being a strictly scientifically based concept), but I'd suggest, first, bump up your highest order to make it easier to fill in the steps: look to geology, that is, and place it on, like, a major geological feature like a butte or something, then the next step down could be whatever the top strata of that is geologically, the next one under that is the actual rock - then you have to figure out what that type of rock is composed of, and then pick one of those compositional elements and find steps between that and the molecular level (the tricky part). Quark, atom and molecule stay the same, of course.
posted by nanojath at 11:47 AM on January 23

I don't know of a list per se, but you could do this a few ways.

Use a piece of limestone, from say, a coral reef complex. From there zoom in on: 1) the different sedimentary layers that make up the limestone; 2) "large" pic of coral reef parts together forming 1 layer; 3) individual coral in reef; 4) skeletal architecture from far away; 5) skeletal architecture close up with calcite cement; 6) calcite crystal structure; 7) calcium or carbon atom; 8 & 9) parts of an atom.

You could do this with a claystone or shale, zooming in on the different clay minerals lying flat on top of each other; or you could do it with chalk, which is made up of fossil plankton, zooming in from light microscope pics of a large mass of plankton to run individual plankton, and then to an SEM photo, and then from there onto the mineral structure.
posted by barchan at 11:50 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Also there are only 9 steps in that life thing, so you have only 27 images in there. You could bump it up even further I guess - a zoological group, a type of vegetable region (veldt, rain forest), and continent? Then down to herd, grassland, geological feature...
posted by nanojath at 11:52 AM on January 23

Richard Dawkins has a theory about the role of crystals starting off self-organizing systems in The Blind Watchmaker. Alternative approach to their life cycle or part in the cycle of life.
posted by yeara at 1:48 PM on January 23