Latest Basalt Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online By using electromagnetic technology to map a large area of seafloor near Central America and the northern East Pacific Rise, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography report that they have a better idea of the origin of the erupted magma that eventually becomes new seafloor. Scientists have known for several decades that the seafloor is formed throughout the major ocean basins at the linear chains of volcanoes known...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists writing in the journal Science say they have found the first direct evidence of life in the deeply buried oceanic crust. Researchers on board the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program's (IODP) research vessel JOIDES Resolution drilled a water depth of 1.5 miles and hundreds of feet of sediment into the oceanic crust off the west coast of North America. After examining rock samples from this depth, they were able to uncover...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An ocean of molten rock covered the entire lunar surface during the early part of the Moon's history. Over millions of years, that magma ocean cooled, differentiating to form the crust and mantle. According to new analysis of NASA's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) data, led by Brown University planetary scientists, this wasn't the last time the Moon's surface melted on such a massive scale. Graduate student William Vaughan led...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online How often have you wished you could safely see a lava flow, like the one that destroyed Pompeii? Did you ever wish you could see it in Syracuse, New York? Professors, students, visiting volcanologists and passing spectators are now seeing lava flows in a campus parking lot at Syracuse University and have been since January 2010. The Syracuse University Lava Project has created a unique blending of science, art, and education to...
Topics in the 26 March posting of GEOLOGY include anthropogenic impacts on the Indus River into the Arabian Sea; possible electrical conductivity beneath the Yellowstone hotspot track; mountain-forming volcanoes and deadly debris flows; melting beneath the Colorado Plateau; widespread weathered glass on Mars; and a new view into Mars' global aqueous history. GEOLOGY articles published ahead of print can be accessed online at http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. When articles...
Two leaves and a bud tea co.™ will donate a portion of sales to nonprofit Whole Planet Foundation to help fight world poverty. Basalt, Colorado (PRWEB) March 15, 2012 Now through March 31, two leaves and a bud tea company™ will dedicate a portion of sales at select Whole Foods Market locations to nonprofit Whole Planet Foundation to fund poverty alleviation efforts worldwide. The company’s contribution will support the foundation’s mission to provide the working poor in developing...
In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces. To add to this mystery's allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some...
Scripps scientists propose mass melting as new force behind volcanic activity in Columbia River region Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb....
Tea For Two...Or Three For Me. Introducing the Organic Tea Duo and Three Tea Sampler by Two Leaves and a Bud Tea Company. Basalt, Colorado (PRWEB) January 30, 2012 Two leaves and a bud tea company has recently developed and introduced its first-ever two-sachet sampler - a delightful duet featuring two of its leading organic tea flavors; Organic Assam black tea and Organic Better Rest Blend herbal tea. Organic Assam breakfast tea features black, organic tea leaves grown in Assam, India,...
A team of scientists from Oregon has collected microbes from ice within a lava tube in the Cascade Mountains and found that they thrive in cold, Mars-like conditions. The microbes tolerate temperatures near freezing and low levels of oxygen, and they can grow in the absence of organic food. Under these conditions their metabolism is driven by the oxidation of iron from olivine, a common volcanic mineral found in the rocks of the lava tube. These factors make the microbes capable of living...
Latest Basalt Reference Libraries
Augite is a mafic mineral described chemically as (Ca, Na)(Mg, Fe, Al)(Al, Si)2O6 or calcium sodium magnesium iron aluminium silicate. Structurally, it is a solid solution of the pyroxene group which also contains diopside and hedenbergite. The crystals are monoclinic and prismatic. It is found in igneous rocks such as gabbros and basalts, and in metamorphic rocks from hydrothermal vents. Occasional specimens have a shiny appearance that give rise to the mineral's name, which is from the...
Gabbro is a dark, coarse-grained, intrusive igneous rock chemically equivalent to basalt. It is a plutonic rock, formed when molten magma is trapped beneath the Earth's surface and cools slowly into a hard, coarsely crystalline mass. It is dense, greenish or dark-colored and contains varied percentages of plagioclase feldspar, pyroxene, amphibole, and olivine (called olivine gabbro when olivine is present in large quantities). Quartz gabbros are also known to occur and are probably derived...
