Geophase

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A point in the sequence of geochemical changes that occur as minerals are formed from cooling magma.

    "[…] contemporaneous with gold are gilbertite, leptochlorite, tourmaline, iron sulphides, feldspar, (rare) carbonates, and quartz; post gold minerals are quartz, zinc and lead sulphides, and many others of geophases K and L."

Example

More examples

"[…] contemporaneous with gold are gilbertite, leptochlorite, tourmaline, iron sulphides, feldspar, (rare) carbonates, and quartz; post gold minerals are quartz, zinc and lead sulphides, and many others of geophases K and L."

Etymology

Coined by Alexander Fersman, geo- + phase

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.