This amazingly bright blue rock is apatite, and yes, that’s its natural color! That texture is neat too, like little cracks in stained glass. This one’s been carved into an egg, because I’ve been collecting eggs and spheres recently.
Speaking of spheres, here’s some agate. Check out that cool banding! This one has a little cap of quartz on top. Quartz and agate like to grow together, because agate is actually a type of quartz.
Look at this really sparkly rock! Astrophyllite forms these thin, tiny crystals that look like tinsel. They’re so fragile that they break off in my hands when I touch them! Sorry, buddy. It’s just for the photo, and then I’ll put you down.
This green kyanite has little streaks of blue kyanite hiding inside it!
Picasso marble is a COOL ROCK. It started its life as limestone, and slowly metamorphosed into pale marble streaked with colorful iron oxide. That name is all wrong, though. Clearly, that’s a Jackson Pollock.
This is alligator quartz! That scaly pattern of overlapping crystals looks like the skin of an alligator, doesn’t it? These shapes form when the quartz’s microscopic crystal lattice is damaged, but it keeps growing anyway.
This little guy is a Herkimer diamond. It’s not a diamond at all, but a type of quartz that gets its name from its diamond shape. It’s neither cut nor polished; Herkimer diamond comes out of the ground looking just like this! I like all the little air bubbles trapped inside of this one.
Obsidian is an igneous rock, meaning it came from a volcano!!!
Serpentine! It’s Very Green! It’s got blotches and patterns and streaks! Do you see all those dark, metallic little spots? Those are pyrite inclusions! All the pyrite in this sphere makes it super heavy.
Sticking out of this chunk of quartz is some colorful watermelon tourmaline! The way tourmaline can change color as it grows is so cool. (And also looks a little bit like candy.)
These are my Blobs of ocean jasper, which might just be one of my favorite rocks in the entire world. Just look at it!
Aaaah, those patterns!! Ocean jasper is an orbicular jasper, meaning it grows in little orbs. When they’re cut and polished, their cross-sections make these characteristic fisheyes.
There tend to be big gaps between the orbs. Usually they fill in with quartz or agate, but sometimes they stay empty, and you get these tiny geode pockets lined with sparkly quartz druzy!
When the orbs are suspended in transparent agate, it’s called jelly ocean jasper! My white blob has a huge patch of clear jelly. My green blob has a little window of teal jelly. Every time you look at ocean jasper, you see something new. What a beautiful rock!!
