Gabbro specimen; Rock Creek Canyon, eastern
Sierra Nevada, California.
Gabbro as a
xenolith ('foreign' rock) in a
granite, Sierra Nevada, Rock Creek Canyon, California.
Gabbro is a large group of dark, coarse-grained, igneous rocks. They are chemically equivalent to basalt. The rocks are plutonic, formed when molten magma is trapped under the Earth's surface and cools into a crystalline mass.
Most of the Earth's surface has gabbro in the oceanic crust, produced by basalt magmatism at mid-ocean ridges. In general, when the gabbro is formed, it lies above the Earth's mantle, and below the basalt.