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]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Cooking crystals in the Earth cauldron
This picture shows a 30 micrometer thick rock section of a gabbro from the Rum Layered Intrusion (Scotland). Large clinopyroxene crystals are enclosed in a foliated fine grained groundmass of plagioclase and olivine. The clinopyroxene core crystallized at an early stage, at 1160°C. They were partly molten at 1200°C during successive hot magma injections and subsequently recrystallized, enclosing h ...[Read More]