As different volcanoes erupt, those with lava can have significantly different amounts of dissolved gasses, different viscosities, and so on. Why isn’t this fluid more uniform? Is there something structural about the earth that prevents magma from mixing? Is it even all a liquid?
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Think of the magma underground like Italian dressing. If you shake it up then give it some time, it will seperate again into oil in top, then vinager, then some little bits of stuff at the bottom. That’s kinda what happens with magma. Now if you poke a hole in the bottle of dressing in different spots, different stuff will flow out. The hole you make is kinda like a volcano, and why lava is kinda different in some places.
Well, the structure of the earth at different volcanoes isn’t uniform. Different environmental conditions and lifeforms in an environment will have varying material compositions. If there’s a lot of water, like an aquifer in the general vicinity, that can also greatly alter the composition.
This becomes clearer when you consider how heat affects a solution. As part of the solution heats up, it will rise up in the solution, while the cooler components will gravitate toward the bottom, creating currents within the solution, causing the materials and solutes to not uniformly settle into a convenient solution. On top of that, we haven’t really analyzed the mantle layer of the Earth to understand what all exactly is in there. …..
.. Anyway, when molecules and atoms get superheated, the fundamental structure of the atoms becomes much less uniform. In plasma, for example, atoms and molecules are pretty much a goop of all the protons, neutrons and electrons, since thermal equilibrium is much, much different than on the surface. Furthermore, the pressure that the layers of the Earth place on the deeper layers also changes up the equilibrium and energy barriers for reactions. So… when the solution goes from being superheated to being cooled down… the chemical disorder starts to reorder itself. What components it cools down to depends entirely on what is in its general vicinity/proximity. It’s not like the atoms and molecules will just magically find each other and reorganize to an easily predictable product. There’s just way too many variables to be able to get any sort of singular uniform model for that. Add to that, that tectonic plate shifts can also induce eruptions and then you’d have to be able to know what the composition of the edge of the plates are at any given time. Not easily predictable. I mean, we have analytical tools to be able to get a general idea of what atoms may be present in a given area, but that may not be able to tell you enough about what molecular organization is.
tl;dr: different regions of the earth have different chemical compositions.
Lucky for you for the last 2 years I studied mineralogy, one dude Bowen made a chart of how things crystalize, there are few stages of crystalization in magma depending on temperature, viscous magma contains volatiles and Quartz which crystalize at lower temps, meanwhile crystalization starts at around 1400°c and some complex minerals are forming, the answer to your questions, magma contains crystals and amourph crystals and has good adhesion so no nothing mixes
Liquid is a very weird term, glass for example is a liquid. With magma it’s the same. But the real reason for this is that the magma which is ejected out of a vulcano is mostly “local” smelted material, which differs all over the world. Some lava is also more hot than other which also plays a role.
EDIT: Glass is not a true liquid. I wanted to use it to show how slowly magma actually flows, which is why “local” materials make up a good part of the lava.
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