Quartzite is sandstone that has been metamorphosed. Unlike sandstone, quartzite breaks through, not around, the quartz grains, producing a smooth surface instead of a rough and granular one. Quartzite’s are snowy white, less often pink or gray. They yield a thin and very barren soil and because they weather slowly, tend to project as hills or mountain masses. Many prominent ridges in the Appalachian Mountains are composed of highly resistant tilted beds of quartzite.
The term quartzite implies not only a high degree of hardening (induration), or “welding”, but also a high content of quartz. Most quartzite’s contain 90 percent or more quartz, but some contain 99 percent and are the largest and purest concentrations of silica for metallurgical purposes and for the manufacture of brick, riprap, crushed stone, railroad ballast and roofing granules. In microscopic section the clastic structure of some quartzite’s is well preserved; the rounded sand grains are seen with quartz overgrowths deposited in crystalline continuity, so that optical properties of the grains are similar to those of the material surrounding them.