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Stone Colors >>Basalt
Basalt is an extrusive igneous rock, sometimes porphyritic, and is often both fine-grained and dense. Basalt in the tops of subaerial lava flows and cinders will often be highly vesiculated, imparting a lightweight "frothy" texture to the rock. The term basalt is often casually applied to shallow intrusive rocks with a composition typical of basalt, but rocks of this composition with a phaneritic groundmass should generally be referred to as gabbro. The crustal portions of oceanic tectonic plates are predominantly made of basalt. |
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