Igneous petrology such as Science and Nature. Study material, overviews of certain topics and older works are often found as books. Many works before the plate tectonics paradigm shift in the 1960s and 1970s contains inaccurate information regarding the origin of magmas. Igneous petrology Igneous petrology is the study of igneous rocks—those that are formed from magma. As a branch of geology, igneous petrology is closely related to volcanology, tectonophysics, and petrology in general. The modern study of igneous rocks utilizes a number of techniques, some of them developed in the fields of chemistry, physics, or other earth sciences. Petrography, crystallography, and
Experimental petrology are analyzed - qualities of interest include mineral assemblage (which minerals crystallized and how much), mineral chemistry, and liquid (the remainder of the synthetic magma base) composition. Equilibrium crystallization studies are those in which a starting liquid is cooled until fully crystalline. This is taken to be the "equilibrium state" of the composition under those particular P/T conditions. Criticisms of equilibrium crystallization include the observation that real-world systems are believed to rarely sit still during crystallization and thus would not be able to properly equilibrate. Fractional crystallization studies represent a fairly recent trend in experimental petrology, gaining popularity as a