Mudstone
Rock made of clay minerals, quartz
Common
A fine-grained rock of hardened clay and silt, like shale but without its sheets: it breaks in blocks. The Curiosity rover found mudstone on Mars holding organic molecules.
Rock
- Kind of rock
- Clastic sedimentary rock
- Rock family
- Sandstone, shale and clay
- Texture
- clastic (grains cemented together), fine-grained
- How it forms
- Clays and muds, grains under 0.063 mm, settle and harden without taking on a layered fabric.
- Uses
- The commonest parent rock of schist.
Identity
- Also known as
- Claystone
Crystallography
- Habits
- Massive
Physical properties
- Luster
- Dull, Earthy
- Colors
- gray, brown, red
- Transparency
- Opaque
Geology
- Origins
- Sedimentary
- Geography
- worldwide
Classification
- Rarity
- Common
- Gem quality
- No
Sources
- Mudstone. Wikipedia.
- Schist. Wikipedia.
- C. R. Hallsworth, R. W. O’B. Knox, BGS Rock Classification Scheme, Volume 3: Classification of sediments and sedimentary rocks (Research Report RR 99-03). British Geological Survey, 1999.
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