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Thus porphyry was prized for monuments and building projects in Imperial Rome and thereafter. Subsequently, the name was given to any igneous rocks with large crystals. The adjective porphyritic now refers to a certain texture of igneous rock regardless of its chemical and mineralogical composition or its color. Its chief characteristic is a ...
Porphyritic texture in a granite. This is an intrusive porphyritic rock. The white, square feldspar phenocrysts are much larger than crystals in the surrounding matrix; eastern Sierra Nevada, Rock Creek Canyon, California. A porphyritic volcanic sand grain, as seen under the petrographic microscope. The large grain in the middle is of a much ...
Porphyritic textures develop when conditions during the cooling of magma change relatively quickly. The earlier formed minerals will have formed slowly and remain as large crystals, whereas, sudden cooling causes the rapid crystallization of the remainder of the melt into a fine-grained (aphanitic) matrix .
Photomicrograph of a porphyritic-aphanitic felsic rock, from the Middle Eocene in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Plagioclase phenocrysts (white) and hornblende phenocryst (dark; intergrown with plagioclase) are set in a fine matrix of plagioclase laths that show flow structure.
Porphyry (geology), an igneous rock with large crystals in a fine-grained matrix, often purple, and prestigious Roman sculpture material; Shoksha porphyry, quartzite of purple color resembling true porphyry mined near the village of Shoksha, Karelia, Russia; Porphyritic, the general igneous texture of a rock with two distinct crystal ...
It has a fine-grained to porphyritic texture and is intermediate in composition between andesite and rhyolite. It is composed predominantly of plagioclase feldspar and quartz. Dacite is relatively common, occurring in many tectonic settings.
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Orthoclase phenocrysts within a finer-grained matrix of a granite porphyry. The matrix or groundmass of a rock is the finer-grained mass of material in which larger grains, crystals, or clasts are embedded. The matrix of an igneous rock consists of finer-grained, often microscopic, crystals in which larger crystals, called phenocrysts, are ...