DIKE

in geology, tabular or sheetlike igneous body that is often oriented vertically or steeply inclined to the bedding of preexisting intruded rocks; similar bodies oriented parallel to the bedding of the enclosing rocks are called sills. A dike set is composed of several parallel dikes; when the number of dikes is large, the term dike swarm is used. Although dikes may range in size from a fraction of an inch to dozens of feet in width, they average between 1 and 20 feet wide. The length of a dike usually depends upon how far it can be traced across the surface; dikes can be up to hundreds of miles long. Dikes have a wide range of rock compositions. They commonly have a porphyritic texture, i.e., larger crystals within a finer grained groundmass, indicating two periods of crystallization.