Many minerals form beautiful crystals, but the most prized of all are gemstones. Uncut gems often look fairly ordinary–like rocks. It's only when they are cut and polished that they obtain the ...

Some minerals in rocks and organic matter (e.g., wood, bones, and shells) can contain radioactive isotopes. The abundances of parent and daughter isotopes in a sample can be measured and used to ...

At CU Boulder, we use petrology to study the formation of volcanoes and their magmatic sources, the evolution of continental crust during the growth and destruction of mountain belts, the genesis of ...