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 Blue Quartz
This exhilarating image was made from an irregular piece of quartz packed with inclusions and fracture planes, but the flashes of blue that add such life to it are the result of internal refractions of the scanner's light.
Quartz is the most abundant material in the earth's continental crust, made up of a lattice of silica tetrahedra. In ideal conditions, it forms a perfectly clear six-sided prism and is commonly found in veins in rocks formed by hot water and in the coarse-grained igneous rock pegmatite. |
