4 hours. 2 hours lecture and 4 hours lab per week.
Earth Materials
Course Description
Physical and chemical properties, identification, and modes of occurrence of minerals and mineral assemblages. Mineral crystallography, determinations of optical properties with the petrographic microscope, x-ray diffraction and structural formula determinations. Introduction to mineral thermodynamic phase relations.
Athena Title
Earth Materials
Prerequisite
CHEM 1211 and CHEM 1211L
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to organize the processes of crystallography, mineral chemistry, and optical mineralogy for the common minerals found in a variety of geological environments.
Students will be able to interpret mineralogical variation within rocks at scales from microscopic to macroscopic.
Students will be able to differentiate common sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks on the basis of mineralogy in thin section and hand sample and interpret the processes by which those samples formed.
Students will be able to interpret outcrop exposures in terms of the physicochemical processes under which they formed.
Students will be able to estimate how rocks from a variety of larger scale tectonic environments can be interpreted at scales ranging from microscopic to regional/global on the basis of mineralogy.
Topical Outline
Lecture 1 - Introduction - Definition of a mineral
Lecture 2 - Ordered patterns
Lecture 3 - Geometric operations
Lecture 4 - Crystal morphology
Lecture 5 - Bravais lattices
Lecture 6 - Miller indices
Lecture 7 - Directions in a crystal
Lecture 8 - Polymorphs and polytypes
Lecture 9 and 10 - X-ray crystallography - Bragg's law
