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quartz porphyry

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thumb|Quartz porphyry from the island of Alnön|Alnö, Sweden. [[Phenocrysts of clear glassy rounded quartz and white orthoclase feldspar are set in a fine-grained matrix. Sample is just over 10 cm long]] Quartz-porphyry, in layman's terms, is a type of volcanic (igneous) rock containing large porphyritic crystals of quartz. These rocks are classified as hemi-crystalline acid rocks.

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porphyry
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Encyclopedic overview

4 sections
Contents
  • Structure
  • Variants
  • Common minerals
  • References

thumb|Quartz porphyry from the island of Alnön|Alnö, Sweden. [[Phenocrysts of clear glassy rounded quartz and white orthoclase feldspar are set in a fine-grained matrix. Sample is just over 10 cm long]] Quartz-porphyry, in layman's terms, is a type of volcanic (igneous) rock containing large porphyritic crystals of quartz. These rocks are classified as hemi-crystalline acid rocks.

==Structure== The quartz crystals exist in a fine-grained matrix, usually of micro-crystalline or felsitic structure. In specimens, the quartz appears as small rounded, clear, greyish, vitreous blebs, which are crystals, double hexagonal pyramids, with their edges and corners rounded by resorption or corrosion. Under the microscope they are often seen to contain rounded enclosures of the ground-mass or fluid cavities, which are frequently negative crystals with regular outlines resembling those of perfect quartz crystals. Many of the latter contain liquid carbonic acid and a bubble of gas that may exhibit vibratile motion under high magnifying powers.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “quartz porphyry” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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