This is the week when major league baseball starts up again. Right now, a small army of groundskeepers is at work readying the fields of play. And that means their inner geologist is on hand as they assess the carefully blended sediment product that is ballfield dirt. No ordinary soil allows players to maintain control of their bodies as they run, field, slide and fall without injury to themselves or each other. Even the umpires are ordering up their supplies of rubbing mud—a special natural silt used to gently rough up the slick leather of a new ball before each game. I've got all the dirt in this article.

It was a real pleasure today to lead an outing of my city's stair-and-pathway walkers that visited four former quarries (using a bunch of paths and stairways, of course). The four sites had been transformed into, respectively, a shopping center, a city park, a municipal tennis center and a huge rose garden. I pointed out a few places where old rock walls have been crumbling, and I advised the group to get away from them during an earthquake, but on the whole a former quarry doesn't have to be a wasteland—it can be turned into something valuable.

I also pointed out that these quarries were valuable for many decades when they operated, supporting the city's growing infrastructure with crushed stone and aggregate. They provided long-lasting jobs for local workers and owners who were engaged in civic affairs. They released no noxious chemicals, just dust and noise, and when they were active the area was thinly populated. There was nothing really wrong with them. Today "extractive industry" is treated like a dirty word and the phrase "property values" gets tossed around a lot. But quarries like these created the property value of a whole city, and their carcasses created more. Just saying.

Crushed stone, and sand and gravel, are just the start of the rock materials we use. Read more about where they come from.

In a development that has been years in coming, scientific drillers on Sunday succeeded in reaching a dark body of ice water called Lake Vostok, hidden beneath almost 4 kilometers of the central Antarctic ice cap. It was a thrilling technical achievement that involved the use of kerosene and freon as drilling fluids and a novel negative-pressure technique to ensure that when the drill bit reached the water, the opening sucked the water up into it, preventing contamination of the pristine environment.

The New York Times has a thorough description of the occasion. One especially nice thing is that the news came on Russia's national Science Day. More nations should have such a thing.

The magazine Geology Today is turning its content into an event, "Minerals and Fossils Explained 2012," during March. The magazine's articles will be bundled for public access, and a panel of experts led by editor-in-chief Prof. Peter Doyle will be on hand to guide discussions. The magazine is published in the UK, but the whole world is invited.