Daily Photo – Granodiorite Peaks
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Daily Photo – Granodiorite Peaks

Mount Kinabalu is formed from . This is an intrusive igneous rock, very similar to granite but with a different proportion of plagioclase and feldspar. Thirty years ago, back when I studied geology at Exeter University in the UK, I'd have been able to look at a rock and determine what it was just by the way it look and felt. Place a section under a microscope and the identification was a lock. Now? Not so much.

One of my geology text books was the Country Life Guide to Minerals, Rocks and Fossils by Hamilton, Woolley and Bishop. I still have it and just pulled it down from my bookshelf. If you look at the photo below you can guess what color these authors describe for . According to this reference, is quantitatively the most common of the granite family.

The closer we came to Laban Rata the shorter and scrubbier the trees became, affording views of the mountain peaks above us. In the photo of Mount Kinabalu from the Park HQ that I posted the other day, you can see the peaks in the photo below on the skyline, just to the right of the mid line of the image. There's a marked notch in the skyline on the left edge of this peak.

Mount Kinabalu is mostly granodiorite, similar to granite but with a different ratio of plagioclase and feldspar. This is a telephoto shot, not of the summit but of one of the peaks above Laban Rata.
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