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Exfoliating slabs of granite, on Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, USA. Exfoliating granite is a granite undergoing exfoliation, or onion skin weathering (desquamation).The external delaminated layers of granite are gradually produced by the cyclic variations of temperature at the surface of the rock in a process also called spalling.
Exfoliated granite sheets in Texas, possibly caused by pressure release. Pressure release or unloading is a form of physical weathering seen when deeply buried rock is exhumed. Intrusive igneous rocks, such as granite, are formed deep beneath the Earth's surface.
Spheroidal or woolsack weathering in granite on Haytor, Dartmoor, England Spheroidal weathering in granite, Estaca de Bares, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain Woolsack weathering in sandstone at the Externsteine rocks, Teutoburg Forest, Germany Corestones near Musina, South Africa that were created by spherodial weathering and exposed by the removal of surrounding saprolite by erosion.
Decomposed granite is a kind of granite rock that is weathered to the point that the parent material readily fractures into smaller pieces of weaker rock. Further weathering yields material that easily crumbles into mixtures of gravel -sized particles known as grus that further may break down to produce a mixture of clay and silica sand or silt ...
Weathering rind of a large granite glacial erratic eroding out of unconsolidated Permian till, Selwyn Rock, Inman Valley, South Australia. A weathering rind is a discolored, chemically altered, outer zone or layer of a discrete rock fragment formed by the processes of weathering. The inner boundary of a weathering rind approximately parallels ...
Pressure determines the maximum water content of a magma of granite composition. High-temperature fractional crystallization of relatively water-poor granite magmas may produce single-alkali-feldspar granite, and lower-temperature crystallization of relatively water-rich magma may produce two-feldspar granite. [13]
Granite forms deep in the Earth's crust under conditions of high ambient or lithostatic pressure. In order for the granite to be exposed at the Earth's surface a considerable thickness of rock must be eroded. This unloading allows the granite to expand radially and sheet fractures form tangentially to the radial stress. This indicates that the ...
Augen gneiss, from the German: Augen, meaning "eyes", is a gneiss resulting from metamorphism of granite, which contains characteristic elliptic or lenticular shear-bound grains (porphyroclasts), normally feldspar, surrounded by finer grained material. The finer grained material deforms around the more resistant feldspar grains to produce this ...