When I was being taught geology the lecturers would occasionally lick a rock. I still don’t know if it was a joke as most rocks taste pretty neutraock
If you are interested, give it a lick, it can’t do you any harm. Although bear in mind that limestones are a broad church, so you may need to lick a few to get an idea of the breadth of their taste nuances.
Unless a rock contains ores then they are usually OK to taste so branch out after that.
Taste is actually a valid and very important identifier used for classifying minerals during geology field work when there is no access to advanced diagnostic tools.
For health reasons, it’s obviously not the primary method, but it usually follows the “scrape test”. Scraping the mineral over a known hard surface tells a whole lot about hardness, texture, color, granularity…
When I was being taught geology the lecturers would occasionally lick a rock. I still don’t know if it was a joke as most rocks taste pretty neutraock If you are interested, give it a lick, it can’t do you any harm. Although bear in mind that limestones are a broad church, so you may need to lick a few to get an idea of the breadth of their taste nuances.
Unless a rock contains ores then they are usually OK to taste so branch out after that.
Taste is actually a valid and very important identifier used for classifying minerals during geology field work when there is no access to advanced diagnostic tools. For health reasons, it’s obviously not the primary method, but it usually follows the “scrape test”. Scraping the mineral over a known hard surface tells a whole lot about hardness, texture, color, granularity…
Neutrockl