
The first site is a remnant of a few things at the G.W.Wright Reservation off of Parker Rd (lower right blue outline in the picture). Most of the rock pile material I saw was focused around a large boulder in there.




I was thinking it is likely that quartz (or feldspar) occurs with a certain frequency in the glacial cobbles of this area. So it follows that you expect to see it mixed in with other rocks in a rock pile with about the same frequency. So if you suppose the rocks of a rock pile to be a random sample then there will be a natural variation found in how many quartz cobbles occur per pile. For example at low frequencies you expect a number of piles to have no quartz at all, and a number of piles to have two or more. One can then calculate the likelihood of seeing a pile with no quartz and compare that to what is actually observed. Standard hypothesis testing will, I believe, prove that the "random sample" hypothesis for rock piles is not a good hypothesis. This is one way to make the argument quantitatively - should anyone care to do the work.
No comments :
Post a Comment