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Marialite
Marialite is a silicate mineral with a chemical formula of if a pure endmember or with increasing meionite content. Marialite is a member of the scapolite group and a solid solution exists between marialite and meionite, the calcium endmember. It is a rare mineral usually used as a collector's stone. Crystallography Marialite has tetragonal crystallography and a 4/m crystal class. It has a 4 fold rotation with 90° mirror planes. Crystals are usually prismatic with prominent forms of prisms and dipyramids.Johnsen, O. (2000) Photographic Guide to Minerals of the World. 439 p. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Marialite belongs to a uniaxial negative optical class which means it has one circular section and a principal section shaped like an oblate sphenoid. Discovery and occurrence Marialite was first described in 1866 for an occurrence in the Phlegrean Volcanic complex, Campania, Italy. It was named by German mineralogist Gerhard vom Rath for his wife, M ...
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Scapolite
The scapolites (Gr. σκάπος, rod, and λίθος, stone) are a group of rock-forming silicate minerals composed of aluminium, calcium, and sodium silicate with chlorine, carbonate and sulfate. The two endmembers are meionite () and marialite (). Silvialite is also a recognized member of the group. Properties The group is an isomorphous mixture of the meionite and marialite endmembers. The tetragonal crystals are hemihedral with parallel faces (like scheelite), and at times of considerable size. They are distinct and usually have the form of square columns, some cleavages parallel to the prism-faces. Crystals are usually white or greyish-white and opaque, though meionite is found as colorless glassy crystals in the ejected limestone blocks of Monte Somma, Vesuvius. The hardness is 5–6, and the specific gravity varies with the chemical composition between 2.7 (meionite) and 2.5 (marialite). The scapolites are especially liable to alteration by weathering processes, wit ...
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Tectosilicate
Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups. They are the largest and most important class of minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of Earth's crust. In mineralogy, silica (silicon dioxide, ) is usually considered a silicate mineral. Silica is found in nature as the mineral quartz, and its polymorphs. On Earth, a wide variety of silicate minerals occur in an even wider range of combinations as a result of the processes that have been forming and re-working the crust for billions of years. These processes include partial melting, crystallization, fractionation, metamorphism, weathering, and diagenesis. Living organisms also contribute to this geologic cycle. For example, a type of plankton known as diatoms construct their exoskeletons ("frustules") from silica extracted from seawater. The frustules of dead diatoms are a major constituent of deep ocean sediment, and of diatomaceous earth. General structure A silicate mineral is generally an ...
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Granulite
Granulites are a class of high-grade metamorphic rocks of the granulite facies that have experienced high-temperature and moderate-pressure metamorphism. They are medium to coarse–grained and mainly composed of feldspars sometimes associated with quartz and anhydrous ferromagnesian minerals, with granoblastic texture and gneissose to massive structure.D.R. Bowes (1989), ''The Encyclopedia of Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology''; Van Nostrand Reinhold They are of particular interest to geologists because many granulites represent samples of the deep continental crust. Some granulites experienced decompression from deep in the Earth to shallower crustal levels at high temperature; others cooled while remaining at depth in the Earth. The minerals present in a granulite will vary depending on the parent rock of the granulite and the temperature and pressure conditions experienced during metamorphism. A common type of granulite found in high-grade metamorphic rocks of the continent ...
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Minerals In Space Group 87
In geology and mineralogy, a mineral or mineral species is, broadly speaking, a solid chemical compound with a fairly well-defined chemical composition and a specific crystal structure that occurs naturally in pure form.John P. Rafferty, ed. (2011): Minerals'; p. 1. In the series ''Geology: Landforms, Minerals, and Rocks''. Rosen Publishing Group. The geological definition of mineral normally excludes compounds that occur only in living organisms. However, some minerals are often biogenic (such as calcite) or are organic compounds in the sense of chemistry (such as mellite). Moreover, living organisms often synthesize inorganic minerals (such as hydroxylapatite) that also occur in rocks. The concept of mineral is distinct from rock, which is any bulk solid geologic material that is relatively homogeneous at a large enough scale. A rock may consist of one type of mineral, or may be an aggregate of two or more different types of minerals, spacially segregated into distinct p ...
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Tetragonal Minerals
In crystallography, the tetragonal crystal system is one of the 7 crystal systems. Tetragonal crystal lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along one of its lattice vectors, so that the cube becomes a rectangular prism with a square base (''a'' by ''a'') and height (''c'', which is different from ''a''). Bravais lattices There are two tetragonal Bravais lattices: the primitive tetragonal and the body-centered tetragonal. The base-centered tetragonal lattice is equivalent to the primitive tetragonal lattice with a smaller unit cell, while the face-centered tetragonal lattice is equivalent to the body-centered tetragonal lattice with a smaller unit cell. Crystal classes The point groups that fall under this crystal system are listed below, followed by their representations in international notation, Schoenflies notation, orbifold notation, Coxeter notation and mineral examples.Hurlbut, Cornelius S.; Klein, Cornelis, 1985, ''Manual of Mineralogy'', 20th ed., p ...
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Halide Minerals
Halide minerals are those minerals with a dominant halide anion (, , and ). Complex halide minerals may also have polyatomic anions. Examples include the following: *Atacamite * Avogadrite (K,Cs)BF *Bararite (β) *Bischofite * Brüggenite *Calomel *Carnallite *Carnallite * Cerargyrite/Horn silver AgCl * Chlorargyrite AgCl, bromargyrite AgBr, and iodargyrite AgI *Cryolite *Cryptohalite (a) Vanadates), 09 Silicates: * ''neso-'': insular (from Greek , "island") * ''soro-'': grouped (from Greek , "heap, pile, mound") * ''cyclo-'': ringed (from Greek , "circle") * ''ino-'': chained (from Greek , "fibre", rom Ancient Greek * ''phyllo-'': sheeted (from Greek , "leaf") * ''tecto-'': of three-dimensional framework (from Greek , "of building") ;Nickel–Strunz code scheme ''NN.XY.##x'': * ''NN'': Nickel–Strunz mineral class number * ''X'': Nickel–Strunz mineral division letter * ''Y'': Nickel–Strunz mineral family letter * ''##x'': Nickel–Strunz mineral/group n ...
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Tectosilicates
Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups. They are the largest and most important class of minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of Earth's crust. In mineralogy, silica (silicon dioxide, ) is usually considered a silicate mineral. Silica is found in nature as the mineral quartz, and its polymorphs. On Earth, a wide variety of silicate minerals occur in an even wider range of combinations as a result of the processes that have been forming and re-working the crust for billions of years. These processes include partial melting, crystallization, fractionation, metamorphism, weathering, and diagenesis. Living organisms also contribute to this geologic cycle. For example, a type of plankton known as diatoms construct their exoskeletons ("frustules") from silica extracted from seawater. The frustules of dead diatoms are a major constituent of deep ocean sediment, and of diatomaceous earth. General structure A silicate mineral is generally an ...
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Volcanic Rock
Volcanic rock (often shortened to volcanics in scientific contexts) is a rock formed from lava erupted from a volcano. In other words, it differs from other igneous rock by being of volcanic origin. Like all rock types, the concept of volcanic rock is artificial, and in nature volcanic rocks grade into hypabyssal and metamorphic rocks and constitute an important element of some sediments and sedimentary rocks. For these reasons, in geology, volcanics and shallow hypabyssal rocks are not always treated as distinct. In the context of Precambrian shield geology, the term "volcanic" is often applied to what are strictly metavolcanic rocks. Volcanic rocks and sediment that form from magma erupted into the air are called "volcaniclastics," and these are technically sedimentary rocks. Volcanic rocks are among the most common rock types on Earth's surface, particularly in the oceans. On land, they are very common at plate boundaries and in flood basalt provinces. It has been estimated t ...
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Hydrothermal
Hydrothermal circulation in its most general sense is the circulation of hot water (Ancient Greek ὕδωρ, ''water'',Liddell, H.G. & Scott, R. (1940). ''A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie.'' Oxford: Clarendon Press. and θέρμη, ''heat'' ). Hydrothermal circulation occurs most often in the vicinity of sources of heat within the Earth's crust. In general, this occurs near volcanic activity, but can occur in the shallow to mid crust along deeply penetrating fault irregularities or in the deep crust related to the intrusion of granite, or as the result of orogeny or metamorphism. Seafloor hydrothermal circulation Hydrothermal circulation in the oceans is the passage of the water through mid-oceanic ridge systems. The term includes both the circulation of the well-known, high-temperature vent waters near the ridge crests, and the much-lower-temperature, diffuse flow of water through sedim ...
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Pegmatite
A pegmatite is an igneous rock showing a very coarse texture, with large interlocking crystals usually greater in size than and sometimes greater than . Most pegmatites are composed of quartz, feldspar, and mica, having a similar silicic composition to granite. However, rarer intermediate composition and mafic pegmatites are known. Many of the world's largest crystals are found within pegmatites. These include crystals of microcline, quartz, mica, spodumene, beryl, and tourmaline. Some individual crystals are over long. Most pegmatites are thought to form from the last fluid fraction of a large crystallizing magma body. This residual fluid is highly enriched in volatiles and trace elements, and its very low viscosity allows molecules to migrate rapidly to join an existing crystal rather than coming together to form new crystals. This allows a few very large crystals to form. While most pegmatites have a simple composition of minerals common in ordinary igneous rock, a few ...
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Skarn
Skarns or tactites are hard, coarse-grained metamorphic rocks that form by a process called metasomatism. Skarns tend to be rich in calcium-magnesium-iron-manganese-aluminium silicate minerals, which are also referred to as calc-silicate minerals.Ray, G.E., and Webster, I.C.L. (1991): An Overview of Skarn Deposits; in Ore Deposits, Tectonics and Metallogeny in the Canadian Cordillera; McMillan, W.J., compiler, B. C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, Paper 1991-4, pages 213-252.Meinert, L.D., 1992. Skarns and Skarn Deposits; Geoscience Canada, Vol. 19, No. 4, p. 145-162.Hammarstrom, J.M., Kotlyar, B.B., Theodore, T.G., Elliott, J.E., John, D.A., Doebrich, J.L., Nash, J.T., Carlson, R.R., Lee, G.K., Livo, K.E., Klein, D.P., 1995. Cu, Au, and Zn-Pb Skarn Deposits, Chapter 12; United States Geological Survey: Preliminary Compilation of Descriptive Geoenvironmental Mineral Deposit Models: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1995/ofr-95-0831/CHAP12.pdf. These minerals form as a res ...
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Greenschist
Greenschists are metamorphic rocks that formed under the lowest temperatures and pressures usually produced by regional metamorphism, typically and 2–10 kilobars (). Greenschists commonly have an abundance of green minerals such as chlorite, serpentine, and epidote, and platy minerals such as muscovite and platy serpentine. The platiness gives the rock schistosity (a tendency to split into layers.) Other common minerals include quartz, orthoclase, talc, carbonate minerals and amphibole (actinolite). Greenschist is a general field petrologic term for metamorphic or altered mafic volcanic rock. In Europe, the term ''prasinite'' is sometimes used. A ''greenstone'' is sometimes a greenschist but can also be rock types without any schistosity, especially metabasalt (spilite). However, basalts may remain quite black if primary pyroxene does not revert to chlorite or actinolite. To qualify for the name a rock must also exhibit schistosity or some foliation or layering. The rock i ...
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