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A photograph taken through a microscope showing the outermost glassy rind of a seafloor lava. The tan to brown colored material is glass that cooled so rapidly there was no time for crystals to form. The rectangular, white crystals (red arrow) are the mineral plagioclase that crystallized from the molten rock. The dark areas around the plagioclase and the clots on the left side of the photo are zones that were just starting to crystallize before they solidified, so they could not form good crystals. The photograph is about 4 cm wide.

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