Rock microstructure intrusions are a result of uninterrupted slow cooling. When a rock cools too quickly the liquid freezes into a solid glass, or crystalline groundmass. Often vapor loss from a magma chamber will cause a porphyritic texture. "Embayments" or 'corroded' margins to phenocrysts infer that they were being resorbed by the magma and may imply addition of fresh, hotter magma. Ostwald ripening is also used to explain some porphyritic igneous textures, especially orthoclase megacrystic granites. A crystal growing in a magma adopts a habit (see crystallography) which best reflects its environment and cooling rate. The usual phenocryst habit is the ones
Obsidian manufacture cutting and piercing tools and it has been used experimentally as surgical scalpel blades. The translation into English of "Natural History" written by Pliny the Elder of Rome shows a few sentences on the subject of a volcanic glass called obsidian ("lapis obsidianus"), discovered in Ethiopia by Obsidius, a Roman explorer. Obsidian is the rock formed as a result of quickly cooled lava, which is the parent material. Extrusive formation of obsidian may occur when felsic lava cools rapidly at the edges of a felsic lava flow or volcanic dome or when lava cools during sudden contact with water