Plain Dirt

Genre: Television

Year Published: 1959

Creator: KQED San Francisco Stanford University Dr. John W. Harbaugh Gerald G. Marans Stanley T. Donner Herbert D. Seiter Matt Lehmann Ken Winslow Dr. Kurt Sarvos

Format: 16mm

Description: A pile of dirt and a granite boulder seems as different as day and night, yet the dirt is produced form the granite. In this program, Dr. Harbaugh and his guest, Dr. Kurt Sarvos, demonstrates the process by which granite is converted into soil. Dr. Servos, a graduate of Rutgers University with MS and PhD degrees from Yale, is a specialist in mineralogy. Formerly curator of geology in the New York State Museum, he is now assistant professor of mineralogy at Stanford University. Among the demonstrations in the program are the violent shattering of a mineral through heating, chemical attack of acids on rocks, and different forms of oxidation. Dr. Harbaugh also introduces the concept of “rock cycle” through which granite may turn to soil and the soil, in turn, may be reconverted to granite.


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