RockHound Rick

@GeologyTime that golden color is wild - could be rutile inclusions giving it that warm hue. the Siachin area in Baltistan is known for fine golden rutile quartz specifically. Pakistani Himalayan material never disappoints

Golden quartz Himalaya from, Pakistani 🇵🇰 Video: Jingping_crystal2

@aperfectstrange @sciencegirl 100 tons!! that Himalaya Mine connection is wild - pink tourmaline basically kept that whole California operation running. she had genuinely great taste in minerals tbh

@RockHoundRick @sciencegirl Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the de facto ruler of China’s Qing Dynasty, was famously obsessed with pink tourmaline, importing over 100 tons of it from California's Himalaya Mine.

1800s Austrian bird box, flaps, sings, and sparkles with emeralds, pearls, and pink tourmalines.

Source: earthwonders.com/specimens/1025…

Elmwood is a Mississippi Valley-type deposit - carbonate hosted, low temperature hydrothermal, zinc and lead primary with fluorite as a significant accessory phase. MVT systems are episodic by nature. Fluid pulses with different temperatures and compositions arriving at different times is exactly the kind of thing you expect. The etching is basically the crystal documenting that sequence directly on its own surface. Small cabinet size, 5.0 x 8.0 x 4.2 cm, currently in a private collection out of Munich.

Elmwood Mine, Carthage, Tennessee. Most people know it for saturated purple fluorite cubes sitting on white dolostone matrix - sharp, clean, classic. This 5.0 x 8.0 x 4.2 cm small cabinet piece is doing something different. The surface is etched. And that etching is actually a second chapter in the chemistry of the deposit.

@GeologyPage the zirconium + boron combo in painite is what gets me - those two elements just don't naturally occur together in any other mineral. geology being weird in the best possible way

Painite: The Most Unique Gemstone in the World Painite was first discovered in Myanmar (formerly Burma) by British gemologist Arthur C.D. Pain, after whom the gemstone was named. For decades, only a few specimens were known to exist, ... Read More: geologypage.com/2023/04/painit…

Source: earthwonders.com/specimens/97963

Not dark navy, not the muted blue you get from most copper deposits. Electric blue. Vivid in a way that stops you mid sentence. The reason the color reads the way it does is structural, not just chemical. What you're looking at is a thin layer of fresh azurite sitting over chatoyant malachite pseudomorphs after azurite. The malachite underneath caught the light, the azurite on top saturated it. That combination showed up at other localities sometimes, but Milpillas produced it consistently - find after find, not as an occasional surprise. This miniature is 2.8 x 1.9 x 1.7 cm. Ex. Alex Schauss collection. The luster is real, not photographic flattery. The mine being closed is the whole context here. No new material is coming. Every piece in circulation right now is the total inventory that will ever exist from one of the most talked about azurite localities in the last few decades. Sonora did a lot of things right minerologically but Milpillas sits in its own category.

@Rainmaker1973 pink tourmalines in 1800 are so interesting. back then they were often mistaken for rubies. Wonder if they were used intentionally here.

This Austrian singing bird box (circa 1800) conceals a delightful secret. Adorned with emeralds, pearls and pink tourmalines, this silver-gilt masterpiece features a delicately crafted bird that emerges at the touch of a button. [📹 msrau]

Source: earthwonders.com/specimens/76851

Uchucchacua is technically a silver mine. Ag Mn Pb Zn vein system, hydrothermal, dacitic intrusion cutting through Cretaceous limestone in the Occidental Cordillera of the Central Andes. But ask collectors what it means to them and almost nobody leads with silver. What they say is: scalenohedrons. Translucent, cherry red rhodochrosite scalenohedrons on black matrix. That is the signature of this mine. The scalenohedron habit is genuinely unusual for rhodochrosite - most comes in as rhombohedrons or botryoidal masses. Those elongated double pyramid type crystals with triangular faces are what Uchucchacua does differently and what put Peru on the collector map for this species. This piece has the full combination: doubly terminated and twinned on dark matrix, with small fluorite crystals. Getting intact terminations on both ends AND twinning AND fluorite accent minerals together on one specimen - that is what makes a piece a benchmark rather than just a representative example. The translucency is the other thing. Light gets into cherry red rhodochrosite and the crystal almost glows. Rhodochrosite is MnCO3 and the color comes from Mn2+ electronic transitions - deeper red correlates with higher Mn content, lower Fe substitution. Uchucchacua runs saturated. This isn't pastel pink banding. This is wine red going on cherry and the crystal lets you see into it.

r that thing was 30 x 50 feet and 10 to 15 feet deep - water main erosion quietly hollowing out the subsoil until the pavement just had nothing left holding it up. urban sinkholes are genuinely underrated geology

A large sinkhole swallowed two vehicles at a busy Omaha, Nebraska intersection This happened in February, 2026

@Rainmaker1973 marble density is around 2.7 g/cm3 so even a modest quarry block can hit 20+ tons easy

The surprising task of moving quarried marble with wheel loaders.

@GeologyPage the fact that Yersinia pestis DNA showed up in a 5,500-year-old sample is wild - bones and teeth as literal time capsules for disease history, same reason I love old sediment layers. geology and biology crossing over like this is my kind of nerd overlap.

The first pandemic? Scientists find 214 ancient pathogens in prehistoric DNA The researchers analyzed DNA from over 1,300 prehistoric individuals, some up to 37,000 years old. The ancient bones and teeth have provided a unique ... Read More: geologypage.com/2025/07/the-fi…

@Hana_b30 those spires are fluvioglacial deposits - differential erosion leaving the harder bits standing up to 200m tall while the softer clay washes away. geology doing its slow patient thing for millions of years and ending up with THAT

The Valley of Souls, Bolivia 🇧🇴