"Tiny mineral inclusions yield clues to the origin of the world’s largest garnets, Gore Mountain, NY"
In the last few years, mineral inclusion studies in the world’s largest garnet crystals from the Barton Mine at Gore Mountain, NY has revealed metastable igneous phases such as cristobalite and kumdykolite, and remarkably, preserved primary glass. The metastable phases are interpreted to be trapped tonalitic to trondjhemitic melts. My European colleagues and I infer that injection of H2O caused incipient melting of gabbro and concurrent growth of large garnet, rather than the long-held hypothesis that the garnet grew in the presence of only supercritical H2O.