This year for the EGU24 Photo Competition we had some amazing photos submitted! In case you missed them before the meeting, for the next few weeks we will be featuring all 10 of the shortlisted photos, and our three winners! First up, Bernardo Cesare’s image ‘The Concert’. This image is called ‘The Concert’. Agate is made of microcrystalline fibrous quartz, called cha ...[Read More]
Heart-shaped glomerocryst (aggregate of phenocrysts) made of plagioclase and pyroxene in a cordierite-bearing dacitic lava from Lipari (Eolie Islands). I study the crustal xenoliths of these lavas to understand the processes accompanying high-temperature metamorphism and crustal melting. But I came across this spectacular glomerocryst and couldn’t help but take a picture! Polarized light pho ...[Read More]
“Crazy Lace” is an agate collected in Mexico, which offers great opportunities for aesthetic photomicrography. Here we see the common arrangement of fibers of chalcedony (microcrystalline quartz) in parallel bands alternating with black thin layers of Fe oxides. Polarized light photomicrograph, crossed polarizers and red tint plate. width 5.4 mm. Sample kindly provided by Denise M. Har ...[Read More]
Blue Olivine set in a matrix of pyroxene, magnetite and plagioclase in a basalt collected by the photographer, Bernardo Cesare, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. Polarized light photomicrograph. Crossed polarizers and red tint plate. Width c. 2.7 mm. Who may have been throwing this stone a couple millennia ago? Description by Bernardo Cesare, after the description on imaggeo.egu.e ...[Read More]
Besides for the purposes of documenting my research, I like to take photos of rocks under the microscope also because of their aesthetic appeal. It’s an hidden, marvelous world. These flying-saucer-looking objects are in fact the fossil skeletons of a Nummulites (the larger) and a Discocyclina (the one on top left), both belong to the phylum of Foraminifera. These single-celled organisms occupyied ...[Read More]
I am a petrographer at the University of Padova, Italy, studying the metamorphic rocks that form the deep Earth’s crust beneath our feet, and what happens when they get so hot to start to melt. I’ve spent (enjoyed I should say) more than 30 years looking at rocks with an optical microscope. This simple, cheap tool, and more importantly, its skilled use, remain key ingredients for good research in ...[Read More]