What is the difference between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks?
Rock Life Stories
What is the difference between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks?
Pick up any rock — a pebble, a boulder, the gravel under your shoe — and you're holding a tiny autobiography. Every rock has a backstory about how it was made, and there are really only three plots. Geologists call them igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Fancy words, simple stories. Let's read them.
Story number one starts deep underground, where it is hot enough to melt rock into a slow, glowing soup called magma. When that molten soup cools and hardens — whether deep below or bursting out of a volcano — you get an igneous rock. The name even means "from fire." It's a rock that was once a liquid and remembered how to freeze.
