Bowen's Reaction Series

Bowen's reaction series is the work of Canadian petrologist Norman L. Bowen, who used experiments and observations of natural rocks to summarize the sequence in which common silicate minerals crystallize from a cooling basaltic magma undergoing fractional crystallization. Bowen heated powdered rock material until it melted, then cooled it in stages to progressively lower target temperatures, recording which minerals formed at each stage, and from these results derived the idealized crystallization sequence still accepted today. The series explains why certain minerals are commonly found together in igneous rocks while others almost never occur together, and lets a geologist infer the conditions under which a rock formed from the minerals it contains.