Eudialyte syenite Isn’t that a delightful color? The mineral with the strong color is Eudialyt

Eudialyte syeniteIsn’t that a delightful color? The mineral with the strong color is Eudialyte, a fairly rare mineral found in igneous rocks with a unique composition. Eudialyte’s crystal structure has a number of rare elements in it, typically including zirconium and some of the rare earth elements, in addition to the silica species that make up the backbone of the mineral.To form Eudialyte, the first step is concentrating zirconium, rare earth elements, and sodium in a molten rock. These concentrations are only commonly found in magmas that have crystallized a lot – molten rock generated by directly melting the mantle will be very dilute in those elements. Forming this mineral requires concentrating those elements by crystallizing out other components and removing them from the magma, concentrating elements that only form rare minerals like this one – sort of like distilling alcohol to higher concentrations (sometimes the magma will also exchange elements with the rocks that surround the magma chamber holding it, enhancing the concentrating effect).Eudialyte also forms from magmas that are “silica undersaturated”, meaning they don’t have enough silicon in them to form quartz. There are too many other atoms – sodium, rare earth elements, zirconium, etc., in the magma to allow quartz to form.In this rock, the Eudialyte is surrounded by feldspars, biotite, and aegirine, which require aluminum, potassium, and sodium to form, in addition to the silicon backbone. This rock was found in Brazil and formed as part of a slow-cooling magma with that interesting composition.-JBBImage credit:https://flic.kr/p/UatgRead more:http://bit.ly/1KcCZiIhttp://www.mindat.org/min-1420.htmlhttp://webmineral.com/data/Eudialyte.shtml -- source link

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