#SpotTheCar Back from wee visit to visit relatives in burning heat of SW England. Here's some #Rewilding in the expensive suburbs of Portishead. This entire house and garden is similarly engulfed. I don't know the story behind this, and it's probably sad, but it also seems a bit cheering that plants and animals have been able to take over so quickly... 🌱 🌿 🐝

#ThinSectionThursday Here's a lovely porphyritic camptonite (probably Permian) from North Hoxa, Orkney, seen in plane-polarized light. The large brown crystal is kaersutitic amphibole, the smaller clear crystal near the bottom of the photo is olivine, & the large greyish crystal on the right is clinopyroxene (with a hole in it!). These phenocrysts sit in a finer-grained groundmass of amphibole, clinopyroxene, magnetite & analcime. The field of view is about 2mm wide. #Geology #Microscopy #Orkney

Just in time for a slightly late #ThinSectionThursday! Here's some fabulous piemontite: a manganese epidote mineral that shows amazing pink-yellow-plum pleochroic colour change. The two images below show the same grains under plane polarized light, but rotated through 90 degrees . The clear mineral is quartz, and there are also some large flakes of very pale pink Mn-rich muscovite mica. This sample is from near Tongue, in Sutherland. #Geology #Metamorphic