Instructor: George Rossman
A lecture and laboratory course offered with two laboratory options:
a) 9 units with a mineral hand specimen laboratory which
gives the student familiarity with the common minerals.
b) 12 units with additional laboratory work on optical
microscopy of minerals. The 12 unit option is designed for geology
and geochemistry majors who will need to learn how to use the petrographic
microscope.
Additional information for students in the class is available here.
Composition of the Earth
Abundance of the elements
Ways of expressing mineral analyses
Corundum
hexagonal close packing, minor and trace components
Spinel
cubic close packing, inverse and normal spinels
Crystal-field stabilization
Iron oxides
defect spinel, magnetism, polymorphs, pseudomorphs
Perovskite
coordination polydedra, coordination number, piezoelectricity,
Pauling's rules
Manganese oxides
polymorphs, electron microscopy
Garnets
solid solutions, end member names, geological environments,
technological garnets
Olivine series
chemistry, solid solution, structure, phase diagram for melting,
ordering, geological environments
Crystal systems
symmetry, Miller indices, crystal faces, morphology,
unit cell
Pyroxenes
nomenclature, phase diagrams class notes, structural origin
of polymorphs, incongruent melting, jadeite
Amphiboles
chemistry and structure, site distributions, cleavage properties,
biopyrobles
Sheet silicates
7, 10, and 12 Å layer silicates, micas, polytypes,
serpentine, asbestos
Silica
reconstructive transformation, colored varieties, opal, high
pressure polymorphs
Feldspars
chemistry, exsolution phenomena
High Pressure Minerals
methods to generate high pressure, high pressure polymorphs,
six-coordinated silicon, perovskite phases, diamond
Zeolites
evaporites
Other topics
color, biominerals, metamict minerals