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GRANITE |
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Quarrying granite
for the Mormon Temple, Utah Territory. The ground is strewn with
boulders and detached masses of granite, which have fallen from the
walls of Little Cottonwood Canyon. The quarrying consists of splitting
up the blocks. Granite is a common and widely-occurring type of
intrusive, igneous rock.
Granites are usually a white, black or buff color and are medium to
coarse grained, occasionally with some individual crystals larger than
the groundmass forming a rock known as porphyry. Granites can be pink
to dark gray or even black, depending on their chemistry and
mineralogy.
Outcrops of granite tend to form tors, rounded massifs, and terrains
of rounded boulders cropping out of flat, sandy soils. Granites
sometimes occur in circular depressions surrounded by a range of
hills, formed by the metamorphic aureole or hornfels.
Granite is nearly always massive, hard and tough, and it is for this
reason it has gained widespread use as a construction stone.
The average density of granite is 2.75 g·cm-3 with a range of 1.74
g·cm-3 to 2.80 g·cm-3.
The word granite comes from the Latin granum, a grain, in reference to
the coarse-grained structure of such a crystalline rock. |
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