Wall Rock (Noun)
Meaning
A rock immediately adjacent to a vein or fault.
Classification
Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made).
Examples
- The miners extracted the ore from the vein and discarded the worthless wall-rock to the waste heap.
- Careful observation of the wall-rock led geologists to deduce that the vein was the result of ancient volcanic activity.
- Although not as valuable as the quartz adjacent to it, the wall-rock contained fragments of an ancient civilization.
- Several fractures ran parallel to the major fault and carried alteration characteristic of the fault's wall-rock.
- Crush the entire core and concentrate on sampling just the main mineralization plus any intriguing structures from the immediate wall-rock.