companies like gemesis can create artificial diamonds so would it possible to artificially recreate the processes that lead to sedimentary,metamorphoric and igneous rocks such as sandstone,odsidian and marble?In other words can we create individual igneous,sedimentary and metamorphic rocks in a lab/kiln/factory that we desired?
Cement and concrete are, in effect, artificial rock, as are bricks and most other ceramics.
Glass is artificial Obsidian
The field of study that involves making artificial rocks in a lab is called experimental petrology.
They can usually broadly simulate the pressure and temperature conditions deep in the earth, but the limitation is that most intrusive igneous and metamorphic processes take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to progress completely. So the artificial rocks created experimentally are always going to be something of an approximation rather than a dead-ringer for something that came out of the earth. It’s also pretty expensive and usually has very small sample sizes, so it’s not as if they’re going to be making synthetic granite or marble on an industrial scale anytime soon.
Many igneous rocks and some metamorphic ones, yes, we can, it involves melting mixes of the right minerals and cooling them under specific pressures and vapour conditions.This is done with melting existing rocks (e.g. how Bowen’s reaction series and phase diagrams were initially worked out) or synthetic mixes. The apparatus is actually fairly simple.
But like GreasyJack said, you’ll only get small sample sizes and particular temperature ranges. Nobody’s making kitchen countertops with those rigs, and lots of rocks can’t be duplicated that way. Sedimentary rocks, for instance, are right out.
This isn’t really true. Obsidian is a glass, true enough, but glass as we colloquially mean it doesn’t have anything like the composition of obsidian - obsidian is an Fe-Mg silicate glass, whereas ‘glass’-glass is most often a Ca/Na silicate glass, a pure quartz glass, or the speciality types like borosilicates, lead crystal, fibreglass and fibre-optic glass.
But not always millions of years!
I was on holiday this summer and by chance happened to be staying a few hundred meters away from the site of the Kofels Landslide. Utterly fascinating and not a little bit scary. This was a landslip some 8,700 years ago that saw 3-4 cubic kilometres of mountainside slip down and across a glacial valley.
The heat generated during the event created a new metamorphic rock, Frictionite, in matter of minutes. I never knew such a thing was possible and it rather boggles the mind to consider the temperature, pressure and forces at work.
For those interested you can get a decent appreciation of this from looking at the google map. It is fairly obvious to see and the slip occurred from the mountain ridge immediately west of Kofels (it used to be several hundred meters higher) and travelled across to Neiderthai on the eastern side of the valley (where we were staying).
The landslide blocked the valleys south and east and created huge lakes until the rivers found new courses through the softer debris and new frictionite so cutting their present v-shaped valleys . If you have any interest in geology and are in the area I’d highly recommend taking a look.
been making artificial rock for a couple thousand years now. They call it concrete.
Granite would be unfeasible; if I’m not mistaken the crystals in it form through a very, very slooooow cooling period.
I’m not sure this fits into the “new kind of rock” category but don’t forget our atomic bomb creation, Trinitite. You make a lot but the laboratory apparatus gets destroyed every time you do it. (I think Trinitie probably falls more into the glass category but in any case, the stuff was given its own name.)
Thats just nit picking. It was left to the reader to throw some Fe and Mg into artificial glass and make it artificial Obsidian…
Is this General Questions? Why, I do believe it is.