maficity

thumbnail|Basalt Mafic is a term used in geology to describe silicate minerals, magmas, and igneous rocks that are rich in magnesium and iron, while being relatively low in silica content. Most mafic minerals are dark in color, and common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite. Common mafic rocks include basalt, diabase and gabbro. Mafic rocks often also contain calcium-rich varieties of plagioclase feldspar. Mafic materials can also be described as ferromagnesian.

==History== The term mafic is a portmanteau of "magnesium" and "ferric" and was coined by Charles Whitman Cross, Joseph P. Iddings, Louis V. Pirsson, and Henry Stephens Washington in 1912. Cross' group had previously divided the major rock-forming minerals found in igneous rocks into salic minerals, such as quartz, feldspars, or feldspathoids, and femic minerals, such as olivine and pyroxene. However, micas and aluminium-rich amphiboles were excluded, while some calcium minerals containing little iron or magnesium, such as wollastonite or apatite, were included in the femic minerals. Cross and his coinvestigators later clarified that micas and aluminium amphiboles belonged to a separate category of alferric minerals. They then introduced the term mafic for ferromagnesian minerals of all types, in preference to the term femag coined by A. Johannsen in 1911, whose sound they disliked.