Intrusive rock
Intrusive rock is formed when magma crystallizes and solidifies underground to form intrusions, for example plutons, dikes, sills and volcanic necks. Intrusive rock forms within Earth's crust from the crystallization of magma. Many mountain ranges, such as the Sierra Nevada in California, are formed from large granite intrusions. Intrusions are one of the two ways igneous rock. Technically an intrusion is any formation of intrusive igneous rock. In contrast, an extrusion consists of extrusive rock. Large bodies of magma that solidify underground before they reach the surface of the crust are called plutons. Plutonic rocks form 7% of the Earth's current land surface. Coarse-grained intrusive igneous rocks that form at depth within the earth are called abyssal while those that form near the surface are called subvolcanic or hypabyssal. Intrusive structures are classified according to whether or not they are parallel to the bedding planes or foliation of the country rock: if the intrusion is parallel the body is concordant, otherwise it is discordant.
An intrusive suite is a group of plutons related in time and space.. Intrusions vary from mountain-range-sized batholiths to thin veinlike fracture fillings of aplite or pegmatite. Intrusions can be classified according to the shape and size of the intrusive body and its relation to the other formations into which it intrudes: Batholith: a large irregular discordant intrusion Chonolith: an irregularly-shaped intrusion with a demonstrable base Cupola: a dome-shaped projection from the top of a large subterranean intrusion Dike: a narrow tabular discordant body nearly vertical Laccolith: concordant body with flat base and convex top with a feeder pipe below Lopolith: concordant body with flat top and a shallow convex base, may have a feeder dike or pipe below Phacolith: a concordant lens-shaped pluton that occupies the crest of an anticline or trough of a syncline Volcanic pipe or volcanic neck: tubular vertical body that may have been a feeder vent for a volcano Sill: a thin tabular concordant body intruded along bedding planes Stock: a smaller irregular discordant intrusive Boss: a small stock A body of intrusive igneous rock which crystallizes from magma cooling underneath the surface of the Earth is called a pluton.
If the pluton is large, it may be called a stock. Intrusive rocks are characterized by large crystal sizes, as the individual crystals are visible, the rock is called phaneritic; this is as the magma cools underground, while cooling may be fast or slow, cooling is slower than on the surface, so larger crystals grow. If it runs parallel to rock layers, it is called a sill. If an intrusion makes rocks above rise to form a dome, it is called a laccolith. How deep-seated intrusions burst through the overlying strata causes intrusive rock to be recognized: Veins spread out into branches, or branchlike parts result from filled cracks, the high temperature is evident in how they alter country rock; as heat dissipation is slow, as the rock is under pressure, crystals form, no vitreous chilled matter is present. The intrusions did not flow. Contained gases could not escape through the thick strata, thus form cavities, which can be observed; because their crystals are of the rough equal size, these rocks are said to be equigranular.
There is no distinction between a first generation of large well-shaped crystals and a fine-grained ground-mass. The minerals of each have formed in a definite order, each has had a period of crystallization that may be distinct or may have coincided with or overlapped the period of formation of some of the other ingredients. Earlier crystals originated at a time when most of the rock was still liquid and are more or less perfect. Crystals are less regular in shape because they were compelled to occupy the spaces left between the already-formed crystals; the former case is said to be idiomorphic. There are many other characteristics that serve to distinguish the members of these two groups. For example, orthoclase is feldspar from granite, while its modifications occur in lavas of similar composition; the same distinction holds for nepheline varieties. Leucite is common in lavas but rare in plutonic rocks. Muscovite is confined to intrusions; these differences show the influence of the physical conditions under which consolidation takes place.
Intrusive rocks formed at greater depths are called abyssal. Some intrusive rocks solidified in fissures as dikes and intrusive sills at shallow depth and are called subvolcanic or hypabyssal, they show structures intermediate between those of plutonic rocks. They are commonly porphyritic and sometimes vesicular. In fact, many of them are petrologically indistinguishable from lavas of similar composition. Ellicott City Granodiorite Guilford Quartz Monzonite Methods of pluton emplacement Norbeck Intrusive Suite Volcanic rock Woodstock Quartz Monzonite
Hornblende
Hornblende is a complex inosilicate series of minerals. It is not a recognized mineral in its own right, but the name is used as a general or field term, to refer to a dark amphibole. Hornblende is an isomorphous mixture of three molecules; the general formula can be given as 2–358O222. Some metals vary in their occurrence and magnitude: Manganese and titanium are present. Sodium and potassium are present and fluorine substitutes for the hydroxyl in the crystalline structure. Hornblende has a hardness of 5–6, a specific gravity of 2.9–3.4 and is an opaque green, greenish-brown, brown or black color. Its cleavage angles are at 124 degrees, it is most confused with various pyroxene minerals and biotite mica, which are black and can be found in granite and in charnockite. Hornblende is a common constituent of many igneous and metamorphic rocks such as granite, diorite, basalt, andesite and schist, it is the principal mineral of amphibolites. Dark brown to black hornblendes that contain titanium are ordinarily called basaltic hornblende, from the fact that they are a constituent of basalt and related rocks.
Hornblende alters to chlorite and epidote. A rare variety of hornblende contains less than 5% of iron oxide, is gray to white in color, named edenite, from its locality in Edenville, Orange County, New York. Other minerals in the hornblende series include: pargasite hastingsite tschermakite edenite The word hornblende is derived from the German horn and blenden, to'deceive' in allusion to its similarity in appearance to metal-bearing ore minerals. List of minerals – A list of minerals for which there are articles on Wikipedia Hurlbut, Cornelius S..
Cambrian
The Cambrian Period was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 55.6 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 541 million years ago to the beginning of the Ordovician Period 485.4 mya. Its subdivisions, its base, are somewhat in flux; the period was established by Adam Sedgwick, who named it after Cambria, the Latin name of Wales, where Britain's Cambrian rocks are best exposed. The Cambrian is unique in its unusually high proportion of lagerstätte sedimentary deposits, sites of exceptional preservation where "soft" parts of organisms are preserved as well as their more resistant shells; as a result, our understanding of the Cambrian biology surpasses that of some periods. The Cambrian marked a profound change in life on Earth. Complex, multicellular organisms became more common in the millions of years preceding the Cambrian, but it was not until this period that mineralized—hence fossilized—organisms became common; the rapid diversification of life forms in the Cambrian, known as the Cambrian explosion, produced the first representatives of all modern animal phyla.
Phylogenetic analysis has supported the view that during the Cambrian radiation, metazoa evolved monophyletically from a single common ancestor: flagellated colonial protists similar to modern choanoflagellates. Although diverse life forms prospered in the oceans, the land is thought to have been comparatively barren—with nothing more complex than a microbial soil crust and a few molluscs that emerged to browse on the microbial biofilm. Most of the continents were dry and rocky due to a lack of vegetation. Shallow seas flanked the margins of several continents created during the breakup of the supercontinent Pannotia; the seas were warm, polar ice was absent for much of the period. Despite the long recognition of its distinction from younger Ordovician rocks and older Precambrian rocks, it was not until 1994 that the Cambrian system/period was internationally ratified; the base of the Cambrian lies atop a complex assemblage of trace fossils known as the Treptichnus pedum assemblage. The use of Treptichnus pedum, a reference ichnofossil to mark the lower boundary of the Cambrian, is difficult since the occurrence of similar trace fossils belonging to the Treptichnids group are found well below the T. pedum in Namibia and Newfoundland, in the western USA.
The stratigraphic range of T. pedum overlaps the range of the Ediacaran fossils in Namibia, in Spain. The Cambrian Period was followed by the Ordovician Period; the Cambrian is divided into ten ages. Only three series and six stages are named and have a GSSP; because the international stratigraphic subdivision is not yet complete, many local subdivisions are still used. In some of these subdivisions the Cambrian is divided into three series with locally differing names – the Early Cambrian, Middle Cambrian and Furongian. Rocks of these epochs are referred to as belonging to Upper Cambrian. Trilobite zones allow biostratigraphic correlation in the Cambrian; each of the local series is divided into several stages. The Cambrian is divided into several regional faunal stages of which the Russian-Kazakhian system is most used in international parlance: *Most Russian paleontologists define the lower boundary of the Cambrian at the base of the Tommotian Stage, characterized by diversification and global distribution of organisms with mineral skeletons and the appearance of the first Archaeocyath bioherms.
The International Commission on Stratigraphy list the Cambrian period as beginning at 541 million years ago and ending at 485.4 million years ago. The lower boundary of the Cambrian was held to represent the first appearance of complex life, represented by trilobites; the recognition of small shelly fossils before the first trilobites, Ediacara biota earlier, led to calls for a more defined base to the Cambrian period. After decades of careful consideration, a continuous sedimentary sequence at Fortune Head, Newfoundland was settled upon as a formal base of the Cambrian period, to be correlated worldwide by the earliest appearance of Treptichnus pedum. Discovery of this fossil a few metres below the GSSP led to the refinement of this statement, it is the T. pedum ichnofossil assemblage, now formally used to correlate the base of the Cambrian. This formal designation allowed radiometric dates to be obtained from samples across the globe that corresponded to the base of the Cambrian. Early dates of 570 million years ago gained favour, though the methods used to obtain this number are now considered to be unsuitable and inaccurate.
A more precise date using modern radiometric dating yield a date of 541 ± 0.3 million years ago. The ash horizon in Oman from which this date was recovered corresponds to a marked fall in the abundance of carbon-13 that correlates to equivalent excursions elsewhere in the world, to the disappearance of distinctive Ediacaran fossils. There are arguments that the dated horizon in Oman does not correspond to the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary, but represents a facies change from marine to evaporite-dominated strata — which w
Quartz monzonite
Quartz monzonite or adamellite is an intrusive, igneous rock that has an equal proportion of orthoclase and plagioclase feldspars. It is a light colored phaneritic to porphyritic granitic rock; the plagioclase is intermediate to sodic in composition, andesine to oligoclase. Quartz is present in significant amounts. Biotite and/or hornblende constitute the dark minerals; because of its coloring, it is confused with granite, but whereas granite contains more than 20% quartz, quartz monzonite is only 5–20% quartz. Rock with less than five percent quartz is classified as monzonite. A rock with more alkali feldspar is a syenite; the fine grained volcanic rock equivalent of quartz monzonite is quartz latite. Quartz monzonite porphyry is associated with copper mineralization in the porphyry copper ore deposits. A massive outcrop of this igneous rock can be seen on the bald summit of Croydon Mountain near Cornish, New Hampshire. Stone Mountain in Georgia is a large quartz monzonite monadnock. Quartz monzonite extracted from a quarry in Little Cottonwood Canyon was used to build several buildings in Salt Lake City, including the LDS Church's Salt Lake Temple, the Utah State Capitol, the LDS Church Administration Building, the facade of the nearby LDS Conference Center.
The large boulders of Joshua Tree National Park in southern California are quartz monzonite. A large pluton in the Atlanta lobe of the Idaho Batholith, near McCall, Idaho, is made of quartz monzonite; the Guilford Quartz Monzonite and Woodstock Quartz Monzonite comagmatic, are located in central Maryland. Media related to Quartz monzonite at Wikimedia Commons
Mafic
Mafic is an adjective describing a silicate mineral or igneous rock, rich in magnesium and iron, is thus a portmanteau of magnesium and ferric. Most mafic minerals are dark in color, common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxene and biotite. Common mafic rocks include basalt and gabbro. Mafic rocks also contain calcium-rich varieties of plagioclase feldspar. Chemically, mafic rocks are enriched in iron and calcium and dark in color. In contrast the felsic rocks are light in color and enriched in aluminium and silicon along with potassium and sodium; the mafic rocks typically have a higher density than felsic rocks. The term corresponds to the older basic rock class. Mafic lava, before cooling, has a low viscosity, in comparison with felsic lava, due to the lower silica content in mafic magma. Water and other volatiles can more and escape from mafic lava; as a result, eruptions of volcanoes made of mafic lavas are less explosively violent than felsic-lava eruptions. Most mafic-lava volcanoes are shield volcanoes, like those in Hawaii.
QAPF diagram List of minerals List of rock types Bowen's reaction series
Carbonate rock
Carbonate rocks are a class of sedimentary rocks composed of carbonate minerals. The two major types are limestone, composed of calcite or aragonite and dolostone, composed of the mineral dolomite. Calcite can be either dissolved by groundwater or precipitated by groundwater, depending on several factors including the water temperature, pH, dissolved ion concentrations. Calcite exhibits an unusual characteristic called retrograde solubility in which it becomes less soluble in water as the temperature increases; when conditions are right for precipitation, calcite forms mineral coatings that cement the existing rock grains together or it can fill fractures. Karst topography and caves develop in carbonate rocks because of their solubility in dilute acidic groundwater. Cooling groundwater or mixing of different groundwaters will create conditions suitable for cave formation. Marble is the metamorphic carbonate rock. Rare igneous carbonate rocks exist as intrusive carbonatites and rarer volcanic carbonate lava.
Dunham classification Folk classification Sinkhole
Polarization (waves)
Polarization is a property applying to transverse waves that specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations. In a transverse wave, the direction of the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction of motion of the wave. A simple example of a polarized transverse wave is vibrations traveling along a taut string. Depending on how the string is plucked, the vibrations can be in a vertical direction, horizontal direction, or at any angle perpendicular to the string. In contrast, in longitudinal waves, such as sound waves in a liquid or gas, the displacement of the particles in the oscillation is always in the direction of propagation, so these waves do not exhibit polarization. Transverse waves that exhibit polarization include electromagnetic waves such as light and radio waves, gravitational waves, transverse sound waves in solids. In some types of transverse waves, the wave displacement is limited to a single direction, so these do not exhibit polarization. An electromagnetic wave such as light consists of a coupled oscillating electric field and magnetic field which are always perpendicular.
In linear polarization, the fields oscillate in a single direction. In circular or elliptical polarization, the fields rotate at a constant rate in a plane as the wave travels; the rotation can have two possible directions. Light or other electromagnetic radiation from many sources, such as the sun and incandescent lamps, consists of short wave trains with an equal mixture of polarizations. Polarized light can be produced by passing unpolarized light through a polarizer, which allows waves of only one polarization to pass through; the most common optical materials are isotropic and do not affect the polarization of light passing through them. Some of these are used to make polarizing filters. Light is partially polarized when it reflects from a surface. According to quantum mechanics, electromagnetic waves can be viewed as streams of particles called photons; when viewed in this way, the polarization of an electromagnetic wave is determined by a quantum mechanical property of photons called their spin.
A photon has one of two possible spins: it can either spin in a right hand sense or a left hand sense about its direction of travel. Circularly polarized electromagnetic waves are composed of photons with only one type of spin, either right- or left-hand. Linearly polarized waves consist of photons that are in a superposition of right and left circularly polarized states, with equal amplitude and phases synchronized to give oscillation in a plane. Polarization is an important parameter in areas of science dealing with transverse waves, such as optics, seismology and microwaves. Impacted are technologies such as lasers and optical fiber telecommunications, radar. Most sources of light are classified as incoherent and unpolarized because they consist of a random mixture of waves having different spatial characteristics, frequencies and polarization states. However, for understanding electromagnetic waves and polarization in particular, it is easiest to just consider coherent plane waves. Characterizing an optical system in relation to a plane wave with those given parameters can be used to predict its response to a more general case, since a wave with any specified spatial structure can be decomposed into a combination of plane waves.
And incoherent states can be modeled stochastically as a weighted combination of such uncorrelated waves with some distribution of frequencies and polarizations. Electromagnetic waves, traveling in free space or another homogeneous isotropic non-attenuating medium, are properly described as transverse waves, meaning that a plane wave's electric field vector E and magnetic field H are in directions perpendicular to the direction of wave propagation. By convention, the "polarization" direction of an electromagnetic wave is given by its electric field vector. Considering a monochromatic plane wave of optical frequency f, let us take the direction of propagation as the z axis. Being a transverse wave the E and H fields must contain components only in the x and y directions whereas Ez = Hz = 0. Using complex notation, the instantaneous physical electric and magnetic fields are given by the real parts of the complex quantities occurring in the following equations; as a function of time t and spatial position z these complex fields can be written as: E → =
