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Purple was the colour of royalty, and the Roman "imperial porphyry" was a deep purple igneous rock with large crystals of plagioclase. Some authors claimed the rock was the hardest known in antiquity. [3] Thus porphyry was prized for monuments and building projects in Imperial Rome and thereafter.
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 ...
Mons Porphyrites (today Jabal Abu Dukhkhan) is the mountainous site of a group of ancient quarries in the Red Sea Hills of the Eastern Desert in Egypt. Under the Roman Empire , they were the only known source of the purple "imperial" variety of porphyry .
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 ...
A phenocryst is an early forming, relatively large and usually conspicuous crystal distinctly larger than the grains of the rock groundmass of an igneous rock. Such rocks that have a distinct difference in the size of the crystals are called porphyries, and the adjective porphyritic is used to describe them.
Trachyte (/ ˈ t r eɪ k aɪ t, ˈ t r æ k-/) is an extrusive igneous rock composed mostly of alkali feldspar.It is usually light-colored and aphanitic (fine-grained), with minor amounts of mafic minerals, [1] and is formed by the rapid cooling of lava (or shallow intrusions) enriched with silica and alkali metals.
Phonolite is an uncommon shallow intrusive or extrusive rock, of intermediate chemical composition between felsic and mafic, with texture ranging from aphanitic (fine-grained) to porphyritic (mixed fine- and coarse-grained). Phonolite is a variation of the igneous rock trachyte that contains nepheline or leucite rather than quartz. [1]
Some of these rocks show perlitic or spherulitic structure, and such rocks were probably originally glassy (obsidians or pitchstones), but by lapse of time and processes of alteration have slowly passed into very finely crystal-line state. This change is called devitrification; it is common in glasses, as these are essentially unstable.