How to Use olivine in a Sentence

olivine

noun
  • Down there, salt water begins to mix and move through igneous rocks like olivine.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 10 June 2019
  • Seitah is rich in olivine that settled out of thick magma, perhaps a lava lake.
    — New York Times, 27 Apr. 2022
  • Peridot is a yellow-green stone that comes from the mineral olivine.
    — Olivia Munson, USA TODAY, 1 Aug. 2024
  • Peridot is a yellow-green gemstone that comes from the mineral olivine.
    — Olivia Munson, USA TODAY, 24 July 2023
  • These rocks are often heavy in minerals like olivine and pyroxene.
    — Matt Benoit, Discover Magazine, 19 Dec. 2023
  • As the cone eroded over time, olivine crystals became concentrated in this area.
    — Lydia Mansel, Travel + Leisure, 7 Oct. 2025
  • As the cone eroded over time, olivine crystals became concentrated in this area.
    — Lydia Mansel, Travel + Leisure, 26 Dec. 2025
  • The beach's remarkable color comes from olivine, a mineral found in the lava.
    — Kait Hanson, Travel + Leisure, 15 July 2024
  • Over time, the olivine slowly dissolves and other minerals form within the veins.
    — James Nestor, Scientific American, 12 Feb. 2018
  • Eion uses a mineral called olivine to replace lime in farm fields to manage soil pH balance.
    — Ben Geman, Axios, 25 Mar. 2025
  • Grinding up the olivine into sand creates more surface area in order to speed up the rate of carbon absorption.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 11 June 2020
  • The team also discovered millimeter-size crystals of olivine within the same rock.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 26 July 2024
  • The change constitutes a rough proxy for old age, and makes the olivine more difficult to detect with an orbiting spacecraft.
    — Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • But complicating this story is the presence of olivine, a mineral that forms from magma.
    — Eli Wizevich, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 July 2024
  • Another concern is that the olivine could cloud certain ocean areas and block light from penetrating to deeper depths.
    — ArsTechnica, 11 Aug. 2025
  • What’s more, the process of breaking down olivine produces carbonate minerals, which are also present in the Isidis area.
    — National Geographic, 17 Oct. 2016
  • The massif rocks contain lots of olivine, a mineral that reacts with water in a process called serpentinization.
    — Bypaul Voosen, science.org, 25 May 2023
  • The tiny glass beads were protected in part by olivine crystals, which act as a barrier to prevent weathering once the rocks are on the surface.
    — Nola Taylor Redd, Discover Magazine, 1 Nov. 2019
  • The upper mantle, for instance, is primarily made of a mineral called olivine, which can’t store much water.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 July 2018
  • Models and some recent finds suggest the upper zones of the mantle are composed of the minerals pyroxene and olivine.
    — National Geographic, 3 July 2019
  • The thinking now is that the Jezero crater floor is the same olivine-rich volcanic rock that orbiting spacecraft have observed in the region.
    — New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Another option is to neutralize the acid on site using alkaline minerals such as olivine or basalt.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 26 Mar. 2024
  • Ringwoodite forms under high-pressure conditions and is therefore denser than other polymorphs of olivine.
    — Divya Dubey, Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Mar. 2026
  • Some of the rocks contain small, colored materials called inclusions that could contain minerals like olivine.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 19 Mar. 2020
  • Later fractures emerged between the olivine grains that were filled with carbonates, a mineral that forms through interactions with water.
    — New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Those observations revealed large grains of olivine, an igneous mineral that can accumulate at the bottom of a large lava flow.
    — New York Times, 15 Feb. 2022
  • The analysis revealed large olivine crystals surrounded by pyroxene crystals, both of which pointed to the fact that the rock came from volcanic lava flows.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 15 Dec. 2021
  • This involves adding finely ground olivine—a naturally occurring olive-green colored mineral—to sandy beaches.
    — ArsTechnica, 11 Aug. 2025
  • Basalt is the most common rock on Earth, formed directly by crystallization of feldspar, pyroxen, olivine and quartz from a magma rich in iron and silica.
    — David Bressan, Forbes, 10 Mar. 2021
  • Trace amounts of olivine could be embedded within some of the volcanic rocks that spew out of the volcano, but these mineral specimens are tiny and would not rain down in the manner suggested.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 14 June 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'olivine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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