Schist is a medium-grained strongly-foliated crystalline metamorphic rock, formed by dynamic metamorphism, that can be readily split into thin flakes or slabs due to the well-developed parallelism of more than 50% of the minerals present, particularly those of lamellar or elongate prismatic habit, e.g., mica and amphiboles.

Schist (/ ˈʃɪst / SHIST) is a medium-grained metamorphic rock showing pronounced schistosity (named for the rock). This means that the rock is composed of mineral grains easily seen with a low-power hand lens, oriented in such a way that the rock is easily split into thin flakes or plates.

Click the microscope button to view a thin section for this sample. This collection consists of the rocks and thin sections used in the Open University modules. The first set of samples are from the level 3 module Understanding the Continents. The theme of the module is crustal evolution in contrasting environments.

Garnet mica schist in thin section: This is a microscopic view of a garnet grain that has grown in schist. The large black grain is the garnet, the red elongate grains are mica flakes. The black, gray, and white grains are mostly silt or smaller size grains of quartz and feldspar.

He curated a collection of 42,000 rock specimens, as well as numerous thin sections, from the 1880s up to his death in 1939: these specimens form the core of what is now known as the Harker Collection.

This collection of virtual thin sections is the result of a collaboration between earth scientists at Leeds University and The Open University. The collection consists of 20 slides from the Leeds teaching collection, including igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks.

Microscopic examination of a rock in thin section enables its constituent minerals and its textural properties to be identified. These are important and essential steps in establishing a rock's identity and in deducing how it was formed.

The research results showed that Rumbia Mountains is dominated by metamorphic rocks (Mica Schist, Chlorite Schist, and Glaucophane Schist). The result of thin section analysis it is known...

... quartz-graphitic schist and other graphite-bearing units show a number of key microscopic features, identified from thin section observations (Fig. 7). Observations include various grades...

Aug 10, 2011 · In this study, the quartz mica schist is a coarse-grained rock with a well-defined schistose texture. The microscopic view of a thin section of the rock observed under cross-polarized light is shown in Fig. 4. For a detailed quantitative and semi-quantitative mineralogical composition analysis of schistose rocks, the X-ray diffraction powder ...