Thin Section Mineral Identification
Identification tables for common minerals in thin section.
Thin section mineral identification. Within the tables minerals are arranged by colour so as to help with identification. If a mineral commonly has a range of colours it will appear once for each colour. In optical mineralogy and petrography a thin section is a laboratory preparation of a rock mineral soil pottery bones or even metal sample for use with a polarizing petrographic microscope electron microscope and electron microprobe.
A thin sliver of rock is cut from the sample with a diamond saw and ground optically flat. It is then mounted on a glass slide and then ground smooth using progressively finer abrasive grit until the sample is only 30 μm thick. These tables provide a concise summary of the properties of a range of common minerals.
Mineral identification assistant index a visual identification resource for minerals in thin section petrographic microscope slides. The method involved using. The minerals have been split into three blocks grouped by relative abundance in rocks.
Identification of minerals in thin sections can be aided by studying as many images of a mineral as possible. Geol209 intensive school day 2 lecture 2 properties of minerals in thin section follow une geoscience on facebook. Chromite is a spinel type mineral like magnetite and has an extensive solid solution in the magnetite composition direction.