No but maybe i can, im a training Geo-technical Engineer, i've been standing in the sun for 8 hours today playing with rocks.
Put it this way FFH, have you ever been in a building more than 3 or 4 stories high? If so, its a good chance the bedrock the slab was constructed upon is well over 10 million years old. How do i know this? The rock cycle. New rocks are deposited through various means (intrusive/extrusive). These rocks are about 1 to 10 metres deep. Depending on the formation and the nature of these rocks, they can still be very secure. In Australia bedrock can be found just below the surface, but then again, our soil is so hard it feels like everything we smash with a shovel and jar our hands with is rock.
However, as part of the rock cycle, compaction is very important. The deposition and build up of sediment does not happen overnight. Pressure from above (more and more rocks pushing down) and uplift from mantle and further down due to pressure biult up by the dynamo affect (magnetism on a planetary scale) causes these rocks to compact very tightly, forming huge huge sheets of solid rock.
To provide an example, Theiss construction had to waste 3 days a 2 million dollars worth of explosives in order to blast through one of these rock wall where i live (as a side note: the geo didn't do a very adequate bore hole test
). Do you think a 10m x 10m piece of rock that broke a drill bit big enough to fit on the largest Hitachi digger we had took 1000 years to become like this?
No this happens over millions of years, why is it so hard to grasp for you when my future employment and our society is built upon these facts?????
Oh and i have a sandstone sitting no more than 2 feet away from me from a river. It is about 60,000 years old and has spent most of that time weathering in a rivier bed. You cannot classify sandstone the way you are. There are different grades, different conditions and millions of things to consider. Rocks do not congregate the way you want them too, much like metals. You could hit my sandstone with a hammer and it wouldnt break