How to Use olivine in a Sentence

olivine

noun
  • Down there, salt water begins to mix and move through igneous rocks like olivine.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 10 June 2019
  • Seitah is rich in olivine that settled out of thick magma, perhaps a lava lake.
    New York Times, 27 Apr. 2022
  • In gemstone form, a variety of olivine is known as peridot.
    CBS News, 20 June 2018
  • The beach's remarkable color comes from olivine, a mineral found in the lava.
    Kait Hanson, Travel + Leisure, 15 July 2024
  • Peridot is a yellow-green gemstone that comes from the mineral olivine.
    Olivia Munson, USA TODAY, 24 July 2023
  • The thinking now is that the Jezero crater floor is the same olivine-rich volcanic rock that orbiting spacecraft have observed in the region.
    New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Over time, the olivine slowly dissolves and other minerals form within the veins.
    James Nestor, Scientific American, 12 Feb. 2018
  • What’s more, the process of breaking down olivine produces carbonate minerals, which are also present in the Isidis area.
    National Geographic, 17 Oct. 2016
  • The change constitutes a rough proxy for old age, and makes the olivine more difficult to detect with an orbiting spacecraft.
    Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • Grinding up the olivine into sand creates more surface area in order to speed up the rate of carbon absorption.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 11 June 2020
  • The beach, along a bay tucked inside a collapsed volcanic cone, draws its oddly green color from a mineral called olivine.
    Michelle Jarboe, cleveland.com, 20 Dec. 2017
  • The tiny glass beads were protected in part by olivine crystals, which act as a barrier to prevent weathering once the rocks are on the surface.
    Nola Taylor Redd, Discover Magazine, 1 Nov. 2019
  • These rocks are often heavy in minerals like olivine and pyroxene.
    Matt Benoit, Discover Magazine, 19 Dec. 2023
  • Models and some recent finds suggest the upper zones of the mantle are composed of the minerals pyroxene and olivine.
    National Geographic, 3 July 2019
  • While how those rocks got there has been a debate for two decades, the new study says that olivine is commonly made within magma that originates from the mantle of Mars, just like on Earth.
    Elizabeth Howell, Forbes, 3 May 2022
  • The cores are largely made of peridotite, an igneous rock made of the minerals pyroxene and olivine, that is the most common type of rock in the upper mantle, per the Washington Post.
    Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 June 2023
  • As waves and currents dissolve the olivine, it is expected to create a series of chemical reactions that allow the ocean to capture CO2 from the air.
    Eric Niiler, WSJ, 6 Mar. 2022
  • The massif rocks contain lots of olivine, a mineral that reacts with water in a process called serpentinization.
    Bypaul Voosen, science.org, 25 May 2023
  • The upper mantle, for instance, is primarily made of a mineral called olivine, which can’t store much water.
    Quanta Magazine, 11 July 2018
  • Trace amounts of olivine could be embedded within some of the volcanic rocks that spew out of the volcano, but these mineral specimens are tiny and would not rain down in the manner suggested.
    David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 14 June 2018
  • Basalt is the most common rock on Earth, formed directly by crystallization of feldspar, pyroxen, olivine and quartz from a magma rich in iron and silica.
    David Bressan, Forbes, 10 Mar. 2021
  • The analysis revealed large olivine crystals surrounded by pyroxene crystals, both of which pointed to the fact that the rock came from volcanic lava flows.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 15 Dec. 2021
  • The cores and their outer layers feature different chemical makeups, and while the olivines cook in the magma, the cores and layers exchange chemical elements.
    Robin George Andrews, National Geographic, 23 July 2019
  • Later fractures emerged between the olivine grains that were filled with carbonates, a mineral that forms through interactions with water.
    New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • This means the meteorite didn't sit still long enough to become weathered, for its metals to begin rusting, for water to seep in through cracks and contaminate it or for its minerals (like olivine) to be altered.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 27 Oct. 2020
  • Those observations revealed large grains of olivine, an igneous mineral that can accumulate at the bottom of a large lava flow.
    New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Some of the rocks contain small, colored materials called inclusions that could contain minerals like olivine.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 19 Mar. 2020
  • Two minerals found deep in the mantle store much of its water today: wadsleyite and ringwoodite, high-pressure variants of the volcanic mineral olivine.
    Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 9 Mar. 2021
  • The examinations revealed that almost all of the rocks contained trapped methane that formed in a chemical reaction between seawater and a mineral in the rocks called olivine.
    Tom Metcalfe, NBC News, 27 Aug. 2019
  • So, take something like plagioclase, pyroxene and olivine, the most abundant minerals in basalt and all anhydrous (lacking water in their structure) and plop it for thousands to millions of years in a wet environment like an ocean floor.
    Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 27 June 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'olivine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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