The Geological Rock Garden in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS is the first ever largest geological garden in Malaysia. It is built around the UTP lake site in thematic geological time-scale manner showcasing collections of rock from all around Malaysia from the oldest to the youngest age. The geological time -scale is an important tool where the Earth-scientists or Geoscientists used to portray the history of the Earth especially in describing the timing and relationships of events that have occurred on Earth to nearly 5 billion year history. In this context, you may say that age really matters to us!.
If you are not know the oldest geological age of rock in Malaysia, you will be fascinated to learn that in Machincang, Langkawi lies the Cambrian age of sedimentary rock that can be tracked similar to the Cambrian sedimentary rock in Australia that were once part of Gondwana continent drifted and separated from the parent piece of continent. Traces of glacial activities and rare ancient fossils such as conodonts (ancient early vertebrates of extinct eelike marine animal (Agematsu et al., 2008) or graptolites (extinct marine plankton) (Jones, 1968) can be traced lived within the biozone that helps us to rebuild the continent drifted model of million years. Rock samples of oldest rock in Malaysia can be found in the Thematic Paleozoic area.
Similar kind of studies using fossils and mapping of sedimentary beddings made us successfully locate and mining our hydrocarbon resources that producing the best ‘sweet oil’ in the world. This high-quality oil can be found in Malay basin as well as Sarawak and Sabah basins. The original rock boulders that represent the reservoirs of these offshore basins from Borneo were collected and shipped to be part of our rock garden project. They can be found in the thematic Cenozoic era. We can proudly promote that this is part of the teaching and learning activities that will be embedded in our curriculum where the rocks will be brought right to the doorstep of our university. In the Cenozoic you will find the ancient figure of Mammoths as well as our dinosaur models of Brachiosaurus, T-rex and Pteranodon that lived between Jurassic to late Mesozoic era.
As we were blessed with the natural resources of gold in the past, the Malay Peninsular was once recognised as the “Golden Chersonese” by Ptolemy. Our gold can be found associated with the igneous intrusion of felsic sills rock mostly in Johor, Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan area. Maybe gold is no longer our main mining commodity, but some minerals that support our biggest semiconductor export in the year 2022 are silica and oxides. These silica and oxides are the main components of the semiconductor that been used in your smartphones and electrical devices resources from igneous rocks. Collection of some igneous rock of granites from different episodes of mega intrusions can be found in Thematic Mesozoic area.
The intrusion geological events are important because it had shaped the surface morphology of the Malay Peninsular and Borneo. Some beautiful granites that used as tiles in Putrajaya for example – the red granite tile is exquisite and produces red shades to the Putrajaya Mosque can be found in the Mesozoic thematic area. Study of the minerals forming these rocks may brought us to the isotope traces that recorded the timing of the rock formation captured by the mineral of zircon. If you are interested in environment and climate change topics, be a geoscientist and study the carbon isotopes that can be found in granitic rocks. Ancient climates from geological observations and carbon isotopes analysis help us to model the extinction periods in the past and the climate change analogues for the future.
If in the future, when the world changed because of the natural cycle of weathering, rock deformation or modernisation, we save the last pieces of rock to be kept in UTP Geological rock Garden for you and our future generation. Come and let’s explore our biggest rock archive!