Wednesday, September 10, 2008

More about Minerals


Dave Schumaker at Geology News is keeping a running tab of the meme-ish geoblogs who joined in on the 50+ great minerals meme, and has some great-looking Wordle tag clouds, which break the popular minerals seen by geologists doing this meme into faves seen in the field and faves seen in the lab or other places, along with one showing all the minerals used (some minerals were not the same on each blog - so please check out all of the below blogs).

Joining so far:
All of My Faults are Stress Related
Clastic Detritus
Dinochick Blogs
geoberg.de-Blog (in German)
Geology News
Geotripper
Highly Allochthonous
Hypo-Thesis
Looking for Detachment
Lost Geologist
Lounge of the Lab Lemming
Magma Cum Laude
Musings of a Life-long Scholar
NOVA Geoblog

I also want to point out a great post today by A Life Long Scholar on probing zoned metamorphic minerals, in particular garnet. Very interesting!

On another note, the rock pictured above is a quartz vein from The Original Bullfrog Mine near Beatty, Nevada (not the newer Bullfrog Mine). The vein features such minerals as quartz (white to clear), amethystine quartz (purple), malachite (dark green), chrysocolla (bright bluish green), hematite (dark reddish brown), native gold (very tiny), and a silver mineral (metallic silvery gray, tiny, possibly tetrahedrite). The old mine used to be a good collecting area for nicely disseminated visible gold (v.g.), but the vein material is all gone now, unless you search hard or maybe go underground. The underground workings are not open, so you'd have to dig your own tunnel or shaft. I couldn't find any of the above ore in January 2000. It's fortunate that I long ago gave this piece to my Dad, because my original pieces are gone, also.

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