Quartzite
Rock made of quartz
Common
Quartz sandstone welded by heat and pressure into one of the hardest common rocks, white to grey or pink and red with hematite. It shrugs off weathering and holds up bare ridges and hilltops.
Rock
- Kind of rock
- Metamorphic rock
- Rock family
- Schist and gneiss
- Texture
- not foliated
- Also contains
- Hematite
- Shapes the land into
- Hill
- How it forms
- Pure quartz sandstone is heated and squeezed in mountain belts until its grains recrystallise together.
- Uses
- Stone tools since prehistory; today dimension stone, crushed stone for roads, and silica for silicon.
Crystallography
- Habits
- Granular, Massive
Physical properties
- Luster
- Vitreous
- Colors
- white, gray, pink, red
- Transparency
- Opaque
Geology
- Origins
- Metamorphic
- Geography
- Norway (Austertana), USA (Arizona, Utah), Poland
Classification
- Rarity
- Common
- Gem quality
- No
Sources
- Quartzite. Wikipedia.
- S. Robertson, BGS Rock Classification Scheme, Volume 2: Classification of metamorphic rocks (Research Report RR 99-02). British Geological Survey, 1999.
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