Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A dark-gray to black, fine-textured igneous rock composed mainly of feldspar and pyroxene and used for monuments and as crushed stone.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The name originally given by A. Brongniart to a rock which Haüy later designated as diorite, which name Brongniart himself adopted in preference to that of diabase.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Min.) A basic, dark-colored, holocrystalline, igneous rock, consisting essentially of a triclinic feldspar and pyroxene with magnetic iron; -- often limited to rocks pretertiary in age. It includes part of what was early called greenstone.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun geology A fine-grained
igneous rock composed mostly ofpyroxene andfeldspar
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt.
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The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt.
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The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt.
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The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt.
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On diabase and basalt ridge slopes, mixed oak forests are found; red oak, white oak, and black oak are most common, and sugar maple, chestnut oak, black birch, white ash, and tulip tree occur.
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Molten diabase and basalt (i.e., “trap rock”) intruded shales, argillites, conglomerates, and reddish sandstones along the scattered sills and dikes of Ecoregion 64b during the Triassic Period.
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On steep ridges, soils derived from basalt or diabase are often unstable; they tend to creep downslope, creating shallow, ledgy soils on upper slopes, and deeper, wetter gley soils on lower slopes near the bases of ridges.
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In New Jersey, native vegetation is mixed oak forest on well-drained upland sites over sandstone, shale, diabase, and basalt.
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In moister valleys, ravines, and on steep, lower, north-facing diabase ridges, hemlock-mixed hardwood forests are native.
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Acid loving plants are absent from diabase and basalt areas.
knitandpurl commented on the word diabase
"Downriver, the great bridge brackets the receding city—Morningside and midtown and the Village valley and Wall Street. What they see in the ground glass is a fifty-fifty ratio of concentrated city and tree-covered diabase-palisade cliffs, with a fjord running through."
"Under the Cloth" in Silk Parachute by John McPhee, p 133
June 23, 2010