This made me smile

A brief pause from the studies to share something small with you.

As I was slowly (but earnestly) toiling through a paper on melting in the pelitic system, this incredible, cheerful tidbit popped up in the middle of a phase diagram:




I'm probably not supposed to reproduce it... but I couldn't help myself. This was almost as good as the time I found a monkey in one of Francis Albarede's figures in his Geochemistry textbook.

A Colorful One

I'm proud of how this microphotograph turned out. It's one of my Sierran peridotites. It took a few tries to expose it properly so that the interference colors of the diopside and neighboring olivine (due south of the diopside in the NE quadrant) didn't come out off. Although the Leica has been extremely faithful in capturing the nuances, it couldn't capture the subtle shift in interference color going from right to left in that diopside. It goes from lower third order blue to a slightly higher blue with a hint more yellow, which you can just only faintly see.





This sample is just a near-perfect thin section. I was lucky in taking this photo because most of the minerals in the field of view were oriented so that none of them were at their extinction positions. Thus we get a nice spectrum of the interference colors of olivine and clinopyroxene here.