Tuesday, April 28, 2015

X is for Xenolith

Xenolith is a big fancy word for something fairly simple. Basically a xenolith is a piece of wall rock that falls into the soup of molten rock moving past it. Think of lava moving up through its mountain. The xenolith has a high melting temperature, so it remains a solid and a separate mass (think ice in a glass of water) in the surrounding molten rock. As everything cools that foreign rock piece is "frozen" in place where it fell in the newly solid, formerly molten rock mass.

This is not specific to rare earth geology. It does however, satisfy the requirements for being an "X" word on this the 24th day of the A to Z blog challenge.

The Idaho batholith is in the midst of the terrain where both River and Ranch and New Grass Growing take place. The Idaho batholith is a large granitic intrusion in central Idaho, where just the right scenario exists for the creation of xenoliths.

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