Mind over magma. The story of igneous petrology / Размышления о магме. История петрологии магматических горных пород

The science of igneous petrology requires three things: igneous rocks, human beings, and an appropriate methodology for the acquisition of knowledge and understanding about the igneous rocks. Magmatic activity and igneous rocks have characterized the crust throughout the 4.5 billion years of Earth history. Despite the existence of a planet that throbs with volcanic activity and that is decorated with innumerable masses of granite and gabbro, rhyolite and basalt, anorthosite and carbonatite, a science of igneous petrology cannot exist in the absence of humans. Anatomically modern humans probably appeared on Earth more than 100,000 years ago. Some of them observed volcanic eruptions, and many of them used igneous rocks such as obsidian. That was certainly the case a few millennia ago when civilizations sprang up in the ancient Near East. Yet the science of igneous petrology finally emerged only when people began to devise systematic ways of observing and thinking about igneous rocks. This book tells the story of how the science that we now call igneous petrology came into being and how it subsequently evolved.