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Geologists take very thin slices of rock and look at them under a microscope to see what minerals make up the rock. This is a photograph taken through a microscope of the interior of a seafloor lava. The large white crystals (red arrow) and the tiny white needles are a mineral called plagioclase. The yellow and green crystals are a mineral called olivine (yellow arrow). The highly colored regions between the plagioclase crystals are another mineral called pyroxene. The dark background is glass that has not been fully crystallized.

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