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Thin section images of xenoliths from north of the Stillwater Complex, Montana

September 15, 2021

This dataset includes photographic images of thin sections made from xenolith samples collected from the Sliderock Mountain and Susie Peak plutons, Montana, along with a shapefile representing the locations of the samples. The plutons are located north of the Stillwater Complex, Montana, which is exposed along the northern side of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana. To the north of the Stillwater Complex, a gravity anomaly is located where Phanerozoic rocks may unconformably overlie the complex. These Phanerozoic rocks are intruded by Cretaceous plutons that have gabbroid inclusions that resemble other metamorphosed rocks of the Stillwater Complex. Samples of the inclusions were collected, and thin sections were created from them. The images of the entire thin section, both in plane- and cross-polarized light, were taken with a high-resolution digital camera on a macro stand. Each zip file, named with the year of the field season in which the samples were collected, contains the images from the xenolith thin sections that were collected for that year. The data in each zip file is organized into a folder containing the 'RAW' unprocessed CR2 images, and a folder containing processed jpg images. The file name of each photograph correlates to the xenolith rock sample ID from which the thin section was sourced, and whether the photograph represents a plane-polarized (ppl) or cross-polarized (xpl) light image. For example, the "13ST711-2_ppl.jpg" file is a plane-polarized image taken from a xenolith in sample number 13ST711-2. Images with file names that are annotated with "(a)" and "(b)", represent samples that contained more than one xenolith in a single rock sample. The .xmp files are included with the 'RAW' files because the original metadata cannot be altered. In order to add descriptive information to the metadata, these files must be included.

Publication Year 2021
Title Thin section images of xenoliths from north of the Stillwater Complex, Montana
DOI 10.5066/P9F40408
Authors Michael L Zientek, Heather L Parks, Ethan J. Ducken
Product Type Data Release
Record Source USGS Digital Object Identifier Catalog
USGS Organization Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center