EARTH121 Lecture Notes - Aphanite, Igneous Rock, Xenolith
25 Mar 2013
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Document Summary
Why certain types of minerals tend to be found together while others are almost never associated with one another. He experimented in the early 1900s with powdered rock material that was heated until it melted and then allowed to cool to a target temperature whereupon he observed the types of minerals that formed in the rocks produced. He repeated this process with progressively cooler temperatures and the results he obtained led him to formulate his reaction series which is still accepted today as the idealized progression of minerals produced by cooling magma. Based upon bowen"s work, one can infer from the minerals present in a rock the relative conditions under which the material had formed. The series is broken into two branches, the continuous and the discontinuous. The branch on the right is the continuous. This is because minerals are most stable in the conditions closest to those under which they had formed.
