Sarah: Diorite. So in Minecraft we have diorite, it looks very, very pale, and you can make it by combining quartz and cobblestone, so do you want to talk about the science there?Â
Kim: Well, what is cobblestone, I wonder? So that's a a different term than we're used to in geology, but I think I get the idea of what they're trying to do there. So on this one side there, we have a piece of diorite from our collection, so you can see really that black and white type of rock, and I think that's what they're trying to do there with the textures at least, for sure.
Diorite is an igneous intrusive rock where magma is trapped inside the Earth and cools slowly over many years. Slow cooling means that individual mineral grains have time to form and grow, so intrusive rocks have a coarse-grained texture. Diorite is an intrusive rock that is low in quartz and contains feldspar and amphibole. The diorite imaged has black crystals of hornblende (amphibole).