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In mineralogy, an inclusion is any material trapped inside a mineral during its formation. In gemology , it is an object enclosed within a gemstone or reaching its surface from the interior. [ 1 ] According to James Hutton 's law of inclusions, fragments included in a host rock are older than the host rock itself.
For syngenetic mineral inclusions, the crystallization of the trapped mineral and the diamond occur simultaneously. [1] In this case, the environmental records from included minerals match that of the host diamond. Syngenetic inclusions can be evidenced by the imposition of host diamond morphology on the trapped mineral. [16]
The dark bands correspond to positions where optical extinction (apparent isotropy) would be seen. In other words, the interference figure presents all possible birefringence colours for the mineral at once. Viewing the interference figure is a foolproof way to determine if a mineral is optically uniaxial or biaxial.
Trapped in a time capsule the same size as the diameter of a human hair, the ore-forming liquid in this inclusion was so hot and contained so much dissolved solids that when it cooled, crystals of halite, sylvite, gypsum, and hematite formed. As the samples cooled, the fluid shrank more than the surrounding mineral, and created a vapor bubble.
Melt inclusions are generally small - most are less than 80 micrometres across (a micrometre is one thousandth of a millimeter, or about 0.00004 inches). [4] They may contain a number of different constituents, including glass (which represents melt that has been quenched by rapid cooling), small crystals and a separate vapour-rich bubble. [5]
Under cross polarized light (XPL) quartz displays low interference colors and is usually the defining mineral used to determine if the thin section is at standardized thickness of 30 microns as quartz will only display up to a very pale yellow interference color and no further at that thickness, and it is very common in most rocks so it will ...
(However, the term prase is also used to describe chlorite-included quartz, and to a certain extent is a color-descriptor, rather than a rigorously defined mineral variety.) Chrysoprase is cryptocrystalline, which means that it is composed of crystals so fine that they cannot be seen as distinct particles under normal magnification.
The melanosome is a dark, mafic mineral band formed in migmatite which is melting into a eutaxitic texture; often, this leads to the formation of granite. The melanosomes form bands with leucosomes, and in that context may be described as schlieren (color banding) or migmatitic.