|
For many many years, people all over the world have been saying "wow, that's a neat rock, I like that rock, I'm going to take it home with me." Some of us even turned it into careers! I've been an Exploration and Senior Exploration geologist for about the past 11 years, recently carrying out a career change to teaching, which will keep me much closer to my family. Mineral Exploration is very much a young person's game, with long weeks spent in remote locations all over the world. I've worked in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and every state in my home country of Australia. So that's a little bit of background on me, but what about the rocks? Well I'm glad you asked!  This is my very, very favourite rock. Massive sulphide ore from the Norilsk mine in Russia. The black stuff on the bottom is gabbronorite, with a very sharp contact to the sulphides, which consist of chalcopyrite (brassy yellow, copper ore) and pentlandite (pale purple-ish, nickel ore). This is my favourite rock for a few reasons. That sort of sharp contact is incredibly rare, with the rip-up of the gabbronorite you can see in the sulphides indicating this mineralised incredibly quickly. I had it shined up for me after getting it from my supervisor from a visit he made to the mine in Russia; Russian samples are pretty hard to get out, he basically said "I'm retiring, so this is my last chance to get anything from here, better make it a good one!". Picture of his haul here - he got while the getting was good. This is my favourite one that I collected myself.  This is a piece of lead-zinc ore from a mine in Queensland, Australia, that I took off the stockpile after asking the Superintendent if I could take a souvenir. I got a slab about 25cm*15cm, and cut it up for everyone back at the office, as the mine was about to close. You can see the individual layers there are shiny silver (galena, lead ore), medium grey (sphalerite, zinc ore) and black (shale, waste rock). There's also some pale yellow in a layer at the top (pyrite, iron sulphide, waste rock). Fun fact, there's a lead-zinc mine in the Northern Territory where they have so much pyrite in their ore that during the rainy season (around 5 months of the year) they have to monitor their stockpiles for excess heat, as when pyrite breaks down it gives off heat and forms sulphuric acid. Sometimes their ore stockpiles catch fire. Perfectly normal industry. This is another one that definitely wins the prize of most colourful.  This is a piece of serpentinite (hydrothermally altered ultramafic rock) with small formations of stichtite (chromium-magnesium carbonate) from Dundas in Tasmania. Like most rocks in people's collections, this one is just neat and has cool colours. Rocks don't have to be scientifically interesting to be interesting. So what are your neat rocks?
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2021 03:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 15:16 |
|
|
 My googly guy!
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2021 08:04
|
|
|
I didn't find this myself. I bought it from a market. But I love it - it looks like there's a landscape in there. Photo doesn't quite do it justice.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2021 20:43
|
|
|
You actually call them rocks? Jesus Christ, Marie! 
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2021 21:07
|
|
|
I have a lot of mineral specimens.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 01:16
|
|
|
Here's some good ones
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 01:18
|
|
|
Here's some more
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 01:19
|
|
|
Oh those are sweet. Tell me about the meteorite slice!
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 01:22
|
|
|
I don't collect rocks very much anymore, even the ones cut for mounting into jewelry, but I've had this polished chunk of malachite on my desk for nearly a decade. My default favorite rock is snowflake obsidian though. Dendritic or rutile quartz has come to be a close second in recent years. Basically anything I can see patterns in I'm good with.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 04:21
|
|
|
Memento posted:Oh those are sweet. Tell me about the meteorite slice! I bought it from an old guy at a rock show at the Reno Livestock Event Center. I think it came from space. I think I got a card that says which meteorite it came from.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2021 05:03
|
|
|
Hello rock friends, some really nice rocks in this thread please enjoy some pics of a few of my favorites. Colorless Fluorite on Pyrite.  4.20kg (blaze up) of Labradorite.  Pyrite embedded in... I don't know what actually, sorry   A chunk of Celestine, with a bonus fish in the background. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 22, 2021 15:56
|
|
|
My wedding ring is a meteorite. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2021 01:17
|
|
|
The March Hare posted:4.20kg (blaze up) of Labradorite. when i see things like this im always like " thats loving cool id love to put something like that on display" Then my brain estimates the cost and i give up. I like rocks but all my rocks are just picked up from rivers and streams because they perty.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2021 16:12
|
|
|
My favorite is a ultramafic xenolith collected from Kilbourne Hole New Mexico. The samples were gem grade peridot and either 1 or 2 pyroxenes with fairly large crystal grains. It's back at my parents house 1000 of miles away so please accept this stock photo of some lherzolite in it's place. I also collected what was thought to be some blueschist in Turkey which had some very pretty crystal structures and colors present. I had a cab cut and turned into a ring. I'll have to take a picture of it for the thread
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2021 08:59
|
|
|
This us probably not the best place to ask but are there any rocks that are like a silvery purple with a mica esque reflectiveness? I keep finding them but cant ever describe them well enough to figure out what they are. Maybe ill try to get a picture.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2021 21:37
|
|
|
ZeusCannon posted:This us probably not the best place to ask but are there any rocks that are like a silvery purple with a mica esque reflectiveness? I keep finding them but cant ever describe them well enough to figure out what they are. Fluorite is the first thing to come to mind, but I'm probably wrong.  
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2021 22:35
|
|
|
ZeusCannon posted:This us probably not the best place to ask but are there any rocks that are like a silvery purple with a mica esque reflectiveness? I keep finding them but cant ever describe them well enough to figure out what they are. Sounds like lepidolite, kinda flaky?
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2021 15:41
|
|
|
Memento posted:
Congrats on your asbestos collection. You could make some sick boiler insulation out of that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 12:36
|
|
|
BigFactory posted:Congrats on your asbestos collection. You could make some sick boiler insulation out of that. It's not even close to forming the acicular crystal habit of asbestiform minerals, but keep being a hater I guess. Learn some rocks before stepping up, junior.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 13:49
|
|
|
Memento posted:It's not even close to forming the acicular crystal habit of asbestiform minerals, but keep being a hater I guess. That’s what they all say, until after a 20-30 year latency period they curse their serpentine collection under their (shallow) breath.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 14:01
|
|
|
BigFactory posted:That’s what they all say, until after a 20-30 year latency period they curse their serpentine collection under their (shallow) breath. This is where I would say "you understand that there are plenty of serpentinite rocks that aren't asbestos" but you clearly don't. That's antogorite, which expresses as massive to platy monoclinic crystals, and associates commonly with the chrome-magnesium rich environment where stichtite forms.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 14:14
|
|
|
Memento posted:This is where I would say "you understand that there are plenty of serpentinite rocks that aren't asbestos" but you clearly don't. That's antogorite, which expresses as massive to platy monoclinic crystals, and associates commonly with the chrome-magnesium rich environment where stichtite forms. That’s exactly what they want you to think. Lulled into a false sense of security.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 14:32
|
|
|
Tsathoggua posted:Sounds like lepidolite, kinda flaky? This actually seems really close color wise. And yeah kinda flaky. The stones i have tend to be smoother than the google images i see for it but that could just be due to them being river stones obviously. Lilac is a much better colour descriptor ZeusCannon fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Nov 17, 2021 |
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2021 19:06
|
|
|
Memento posted:This is where I would say "you understand that there are plenty of serpentinite rocks that aren't asbestos" but you clearly don't. That's antogorite, which expresses as massive to platy monoclinic crystals, and associates commonly with the chrome-magnesium rich environment where stichtite forms. I found an interesting paper which mentions that after discovering abnormal amounts of fibres while building a tunnel thorugh serpentite, they did some research and found: 'Gentle crushing of antigoritic serpentinite samples proved their strong tendency for forming asbestiform silicate fibres when disintegrated.' so.. yeah... Be a bit careful maybe? Possibly give it a coat of epoxy varnish just to be sure?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2021 21:58
|
|
|
Let's say I have a lot of beautiful but raw rocks, and I want to make them shiny smooth and glossy as hell like some of the above pics, how would I best go about doing that?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2021 09:54
|
|
|
The Demilich posted:Let's say I have a lot of beautiful but raw rocks, and I want to make them shiny smooth and glossy as hell like some of the above pics, how would I best go about doing that? Tumblin, man
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2021 11:02
|
|
|
Hoping one of you rock-lovin' folks could tell me what this carved pig is made out of?  He's about 6 in/15cm and weighs in at 3lb/1.2kg. Fairly polished, but not super-glossy. I have no idea where or when it's from, though he's got a circle carved on his forehead like a bindi or a Buddha third eye kind of thing. Appreciate any thoughts!
|
|
#
?
Dec 7, 2021 21:29
|
|
|
My grandpa was a hobby collector and gemcutter for much of his life, I’ll post some stuff he gave me when I can. In true old man fashion barely any of it was ever labeled though 
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2021 15:22
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:Hoping one of you rock-lovin' folks could tell me what this carved pig is made out of? That's a dense little piggy! There's a couple of different rocks it could be. Very hard to tell in a polished form like this, because the crystal habit that is erased with the polishing is one of the ways you classify rocks. It could be a pegmatite, which is the last thing to crystallise out of a magma, and often has very large crystals of plagioclase feldspar, which could be the white/off-white matrix. The green would then possibly be almandine (a type of garnet) or chrysoberyl, or Again, the problem with classifying such a nicely polished specimen is that the next steps to ID it are things like scratching it for hardness, which is out of the question here. If you had any idea of where it came from, ie continent/region you could narrow it down because people very rarely carve things with rocks they have to get in from somewhere else. The Demilich posted:Let's say I have a lot of beautiful but raw rocks, and I want to make them shiny smooth and glossy as hell like some of the above pics, how would I best go about doing that? Yeah, tumbling is your friend here. Here's some I found on the internet, not my rocks, these are granite and granitoids, and the polished ones aren't the raw ones in the first image, but these are the kind of results you could expect to see   This is a sample (not really a rock, we'll go into that) I picked up from an exploration company that was going out of business; they were basically junking thousands of meters of drill core. I would have never put the lacquer on this and one day I'll get around to taking it off, but the cut face on this one is difficult to polish.  This is a piece of half drill core with a heavily altered quartz vein with biotite on the selvedges running through patchy pentlandite (nickel sulphide) altered mudstone. The little yellow spots are gold. The spots of gold are the reason this is difficult to polish, because of how much softer they are than the surrounding rock.  This is the raw back of the drill core sample, as you can see whoever lacquered it was fairly heavy-handed. The gold here is interesting because you can see the marks of the drill bit that was used running across the gold perpendicular to the core; this is a great tell if you can't quite decide if something is gold or not, because it's basically the only thing soft enough in the rock to have those grooves in it.  This is a drill bit of the sort used to drill out this sort of sample, this is upside down with the cutting face showing.  The tiny spots are diamonds.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2021 23:53
|
|
|
Memento posted:It could be a pegmatite, which is the last thing to crystallise out of a magma, and often has very large crystals of plagioclase feldspar, which could be the white/off-white matrix. The green would then possibly be almandine (a type of garnet) or chrysoberyl, or Memento posted:
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2021 00:37
|
|
|
I'll need to see that sample in person Memento. Please send it to me so I can confirm that's what it is.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2021 00:43
|
|
|
Scarodactyl posted:No offense but I can guarantee that it is not this. Probably not now that I think about it, you're right. There were more samples like that, but I only had a couple of sample bags available to me and there was a very limited window to take things. The office where they were stored was about to be picked up and put on the back of a truck to have the asbestos taken out of the walls and then junked, and we were wearing disposable hazmat suits at the time. I got one, the superintendent I was there with got a couple and then, well.  This feels like it should be a crime, to be honest. Most of this was just mine def and sterilisation core, but there were some nice samples we didn't have room for in the offices.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2021 00:53
|
|
|
Thanks for the replies about Mr. Pig, y'all! Still a bit of a mystery, but I appreciate the response. Other threads have suggested everything from jadeite to soapstone. Content tax: I used to have a pretty sweet mineral collection, but unfortunately had to sell most of it off a couple years back when I found myself jobless and homeless. That said, I guess it's safe to say my Favorite Rock would have to be bismuth, because I just couldn't sell those two. Weird rear end Escher-esque/Lovecraftian cities in rainbow oil-slick colors, what's not to love? (Not my pic; WISH I had one this big) 
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2021 01:54
|
|
|
Any of y’all collect yourselves? Is there even any place to do that on public land anymore? As a kid reading my grandpa’s rock & gem issues even then the tone was kinda wistful when it came to finding stuff in mine tailings and going looking for things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2021 15:03
|
|
|
I'd be worried about damaging the environment probably. Occasionally I find a neat rock in the back garden though! I have a big chunk of carborundum at home which is an unnatural rock but looks amazing, like an evil asteroid base. I'll try to get a pic if I remember.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2021 18:35
|
|
|
There are still lots of places to collect, though it is a lot easier in the west where there is exposed rock and land without stripmalls on it. I've found some interesting things in my area at times though (central NC), agates, hematite, pyrite, magnetite, nothing too insane but fun stuff and occasionally things good for lapidary work.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2021 21:59
|
|
|
Google search for local rockhounding clubs and see what you can find - Odds are you can find a club at least somewhere nearby, and many of them do routine field trips to mines/collection areas/etc. Not all clubs are worth your time (or filled with good people) but some are, and they can be great ways to get into places where a lone amateur may not otherwise be allowed.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2021 22:10
|
|
|
Scarodactyl posted:LI've found some interesting things in my area at times though (central NC), agates, hematite, pyrite, magnetite, nothing too insane but fun stuff and occasionally things good for lapidary work. There’s way more interesting stuff going on in central and western NC than I realized when I was growing up there. Like I knew the Appalachians held some mining but iirc there was even stuff down in McDowell Co at one time.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2021 13:22
|
|
|
the yeti posted:Any of y’all collect yourselves? Is there even any place to do that on public land anymore? there's still plenty of rocks in the ground but to find good ones you probably need to know a guy who knows where to look. See if there's a rockhounding/lapidary/whatever group in the area and they'll hook you up, might be able to get you in some active quarries or the like too. I have no recollection of what these are but I hauled a bunch of these weird green crystals out of a gravel quarry one of the local groups arranged a visit to:  also yeah it's much easier to find way better quality stuff out West. Even then word of mouth helps a lot, though, cause things change - used to be a giant field of obsidian not far from my aunt's place in New Mexico, then one of the fires covered it with ash and there's nothing to be found unless you roll in there with a backhoe. Even on the East Coast you can still just pick cool stuff off the ground in the right places, like these fossil corals from the shores just east of DC (still looking for one of the megalodon teeth, though) 
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Dec 22, 2021 |
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2021 22:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 15:16 |
|
|
We recently found a nice little patch of agates locally, which we slabbed and I cut and set in jewelry for christmas presents. Kind of fun for a personal touch.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2021 20:39
|
|