Pavement Geology: Pegmatites

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Pavement Geology:

At a new construction site, just a few minutes walk from my house, I came across these polished countertops used on building exteriors.

Isn't it a beauty? It has the texture of a pegmatite. These are a variety of igneous rocks made up of large interlocking crystals of feldspar, quartz, mica and smaller amounts of minerals like tourmaline, hornblende, calcite and many others. They crystallize from a magma rich in dissolved water and other volatile elements like flourine and chlorine. The presence of these fluids enhance the delivery of elements to sites of mineral growth, enabling the crystals to grow to a large size. 

This counter top has amazingly large faceted white feldspar crystals set in an oily grey quartz rich matrix. 

I wondered where it was from? And as I stood there, I wondered whether it was a natural rock or an engineered composite. I could not get close to feel the texture and hardness, but there is a sure shot way to distinguish natural from artificial rock. Always look for identical repeating patterns.

On another panel, I found the exact same crystal association.

The crystals had the same cleavage, cracks, inclusions, and resorbed edges (uneven jagged boundary due to reaction of the crystal with the remaining magmatic fluids). Natural products will be variable. This is definitely a synthetic material perhaps with a printed laminate mimicking a geologic texture.

It is extremely well done though! The building owner happened to be there and I asked her where she got them. She told me the panels were shipped in from Dubai. She could not say anything more about them.

Classic!

One last picture of a vertical panel. Check out the identical pointed white crystals of feldspar and the duplications in the quartz matrix. 

More pavement geology to come. I might make it into a mini series of blog posts.

Dear Email Subscribers

Dear Email Subscribers-

Starting with this post, emails to you will be delivered courtesy MailChimp. Feedburner which has been sending you updates to my blog all these years is discontinuing its email subscription service from July. Your email addresses have already been transferred to MailChimp, so there is no need for any action on your part. 

I did get some feedback while I was testing out this new service. For some Gmail addresses, post were being directed to the Promotions folder. Please do keep an eye out for Rapid Uplift mails in your Promotions folder too and manually move them to your inbox so Gmail learns to treat them as Not Spam. I am still tinkering with the style aspects so you can expect subsequent emails to have differing formatting. The content however will remain strictly geology! :)

Over the years, I've had the privilege of being followed by a substantial subscriber base. Naturally I don't know most of  you personally. Feel free to press the Reply button and drop a line. I would love to hear from  you. 

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Moving On From Google Reader

There Is No Google Reader Replacement, Only Alternatives

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You Now Have Easier Access To Some Of My Favorite Posts

This was suggested to me by Indian Top Blogs who reviewed my blog some time back and I've been wanting to do this for a while. Give readers easier access to posts written long back. I've created categories just below the blog banner image that describe some of my favorite topics and experiences. These are not necessarily the most popular posts by the metrics but are topics which I've enjoyed covering.

Great Conversations- I love listening to a good science conversation and these posts cover some of the more engaging talks I've come across.

My Book Shelf - I've posted passages from books that I had been reading at that instance, often with my commentary and thoughts.

Humor - Can't live without that!

Field Trips - Can't live without that either!!

Maps - Wouldn't be a geology blog if I didn't cover interesting maps.

Geology and Livelihoods - Where I explore the myriad ways in which geology impacts our lives.

I might add categories, so readers following my blog via email or feed do go over to the site once in a while to see if any new category has been added.

Back To The Old Blogger Template

Admin stuff...

After experimenting with the new Template Designer on offer with Draft Blogger I am back to the old minima template on regular Blogger.

I liked the look of the new template I had tried. It was the simple style by Josh Peterson. But for some reason the page was slower to download and also broke up while scrolling. I have noticed that on few other blogs which are using the Designer Template.

I've tinkered with old minima template though. My pet peeve was that it was too narrow and I didn't want the stretch version.

In Layout- Edit Html I changed the width of the Header as well as the Wrapper. These two elements control the width of your blog title and the width of the banner image you want to insert and the width of the main post text and the sidebar.

I'm happy with the results. The page is wide enough to insert larger figures than before and the wider banner image looks good too.