What is Experimental Petrology?
Experimental Petrology. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2017, from https://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/research-groups/experimental-petrology/
Experiment petrology is the study of chemical and physical behavior of rocks through experimentation. Since we don’t see much of the inside of the earth, we don’t know exactly how and of what composition rocks are formed. Geologists spend time experimenting these features by “literally making [their] own rocks (so that [they] can be sure what they are made of) and then imposing very specific conditions on them (carefully controlled temperatures, pressures and chemical environments) to see how they respond.” This is a very quantitative, analytical process.
Koziol, A., Perkins, D., & Brady, J. (2016, November 10). Experimental Petrology. Retrieved September 23, 2017, from https://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/equilibria/experimentalpetrology.html
Simply observing rock in nature is not enough to tell us much about the composition and behavior of rocks. Nature poses too many limitations on gathering geological data. In geology, time, temperature, pressure, etc. are all major limitations in observation. Because of this, methods of experimentation are used to recreate and hasten these processes. While nature takes millions of years to transition from one part of the rock cycle to another, experimentalists can conduct an experiment anywhere from a minute to a couple of weeks. While this does help us learn more about rock composition, because it isn’t entirely natural it may not be entirely accurate.