Oolite

Oolite (egg stone) is a sedimentary rock formed from ooids, spherical grains composed of concentric layers. The name derives from the Ancient Greek word ᾠόν for egg. Strictly, oolites consist of ooids of diameter 0.25–2 mm; rocks composed of ooids larger than 2 mm are called pisolites. The term oolith can refer to oolite or individual ooids.

Composition

Ooids are most commonly composed of calcium carbonate (calcite or aragonite), but can be composed of phosphate, chert, dolomite or iron minerals, including hematite. Dolomitic and chert ooids are most likely the result of the replacement of the original texture in limestone. Oolitic hematite occurs at Red Mountain near Birmingham, Alabama, along with oolitic limestone.

They are usually formed in warm, supersaturated, shallow, highly agitated marine water intertidal environments, though some are formed in inland lakes. The mechanism of formation starts with a small fragment of sediment acting as a 'seed', e.g. a piece of a shell. Strong intertidal currents wash the 'seeds' around on the seabed, where they accumulate layers of chemically precipitated calcite from the supersaturated water. The oolites are commonly found in large current bedding structures that resemble sand dunes. The size of the oolite reflects the time they have had exposed to the water before they were covered with later sediment.

Oolite (video game)

Oolite is a free and open source 3D space trading and combat simulator in the spirit of Elite. It is, as the name suggests, Object Oriented [E]lite, written in Objective-C. Among Oolite's several similarities to its inspirational source, the gaming experience is enhanced by the context set in Elite's original manual, and the accompanying novella, The Dark Wheel. Oolite is licensed under GNU GPL version 2 for the source code and Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA for other resources (pictures, music, textures, models).

History

Giles Williams began work on Oolite for Mac OS X in 2003. In July 2004, Oolite v1.0 was released but remained in active development for a long time afterwards.

By September 2005, Mac Oolite had reached v1.52, and a Linux port was released, closely following the Mac OS X developments since.

In March 2006, the Windows GNUstep port was released. Ports are also available for SGI IRIX and FreeBSD on Intel architectures. Most ports include the same functionality except for the Mac OS X version which includes additional support of native Mac OS X features (such as integration with iTunes, Spotlight and Growl support).