Minerals and Rocks: Inks Lake - Research Paper Example

Devil's Washtub is located in Inks Lake National Park. This is a state park found in the United States of America, Burnet County, Texas. The landscape of the park is hilly with many cedar, live oak, cacti, and Yuccas. The ground of the park is rocky, mainly consisting of Gneiss rock. The park has a natural forest known as Ghost Forest. The Devil's Washtub/waterhole is a small extension of the Inks Lake National Park, which is almost surrounded by rocks. Tourists visiting the area conduct canoe tour within the Devil's Waterhole.

Diving and swimming are also done but without a lifeguard, at personal risk. The park also acts as a habitat for wildlife such as quail, deer, vultures, and other many varieties of birds. The rocks within the Devil's washtub are dated 1,232 million years old. The field trip was carried out to investigate the geology of the area. The main type of rocks found within the area was Gneiss, quartzite, granite, and amphibole/amphibolite. The most common rock within the Devilstub - Gneiss is a laminated metamorphic rock similar to granite.

It is a coarse-grained metamorphic rock formed by sedimentary rocks through regional metamorphism. The field research showed that these rocks contained a wide range of minerals, such as feldspars, quartz, mica minerals, aluminous and ferromagnesian silicates. The gneiss rocks were also found to contain some amounts of iron, nickel, silicon, and cobalt. The granite rock among feldspar, quartz, and mica also contained diamond and chalk. Some parts within the Devil's water mouth also contained the amphibolite rock.

These kinds of rocks were found to contain some amounts of feldspar with little amounts of quartz. The trip study also showed that these rocks had severally undergone metamorphism, a change in the structure of rock by natural agencies such as pressure, heat, or the introduction of new chemical substances.