Stand-Up Science! April 25th.

It was a great experience to participate Stand-Up Science Battle last week! I was waiting for this type of event for so long. Science have to be popular and interesting! 

So you can present whatever you want about science but there are several rules:

1. You have only 3 minutes to talk about your breathtaking activity.

2. Keep your speech free of too much scientific words that are not so popular among non-interested people.

This is event appeared tough one for me. 3 minutes is incredibly short period. Explaining every word is unacceptable in this case. So the end of my presentation was clipped. 

I was talking about studying of magmatic rocks. From the very beginning - crystals, mineral grains; to large magmatic provinces. I have tried to show that studying texture, structure and minerals could give us enough information to suppose geological setting and conditions of crystallization.

You are looking at the texture (the large crystal and fine-grained ground mass) you already know that this is volcanic rock. The rock formed from lava erupted on the day surface. Plagioclase phenocryst, Shipunskiy cape, Kamchatka.

The main idea was to explain that during the geological history magmatic rocks occurred not randomly. And we (Russian Federation) are lucky that we have so many Earth's surface. We could observe so many different geological processes and settings. I tried to link it with Kola peninsula - huge alkaline magmatic province, that could be compared only with the provinces of Canada and Greenland. The rocks occurred over there are extremely rare. Some of them contains huge deposits of rare elements. This part of my presentation was interrupted by the signal.

Аttentive audience

Anyways, I am thankful to my friends who came and supported me. Also, I thank organizers and sponsors for making this things possible. I am really glad to see that so many people are interested in making science interesting and popular. I did not win a place but still very happy. Everyone obtained their own named certificate of participation.

The participant certificate

The process of awarding. Thank you for the attention!

Pictures are taken from official network communities. Photographer Ekaterina Taraskina.