Basalt or Lava Stone – What’s the difference?
26/08/2021 - hoàng anh - 2 Comment
SHC Factory
The world of natural stone is diverse and full of different words that are different, but describe the same thing. There are many names and terminologies that make us unable to distinguish the differences between rock. One of them is Basalt and Lava.
SHC Factory
Here at SHC Factory, we have been working with Basalt for many years and we have received many questions from customers about the difference between the Lava stone and Basalt stone. Are they the same Stone? Let’s take a deep dive into these two stones and learn how they are both similar and different.
SHC Factory
SHC Factory
We’ll go ahead and start with Basalt, since this is a stone that we’ve worked with for many years, and define it, at a very high level, as an igneous rock that is formed from the rapid cooling of lava at or very near the surface. One of the key things to know about basalt is that it has a fine grained mineral texture which is formed because the molten lava is cooling so quickly that it doesn’t have time to form for large mineral crystals to grow. Basalt is generally going to be in the grey to dark grey to black color range since its formed from molten lava.
SHC Factory
SHC Factory
Basalt is a very workable stone that can be cut thin, has suitable hardness and durability for a variety of commercial applications, and can be honed, polished, or finished in a variety of other ways to create interesting products.
SHC Factory
SHC Factory
Lava Stone is a more generic term than Basalt from a geological standpoint. Most of the time it’s used in the stone industry to describe any stone that is a volcanic rock, which in reality can vary widely based on the mineral content of the volcanic rock itself. The Lava Stone that we are using in our wall veneer products has a very similar make up to basalt from a mineral composition standpoint, the main difference is that the Lava Stone has varying degrees of vesicles, or what we simply refer to as “holes”. These vesicles form when gases that were dissolved in the molten magma come out of the solution during eruption, creating bubbles in the molten rock, some of which get frozen in place as the rock cools and becomes solid, creating the unique veining and natural stone “marking” that we see in our lava stone products. This stone generally cools less rapidly than basalt, making the grain not quite as fine and not as dense.
SHC Factory
