Fun fact: Diamonds pinpoint the start of colliding continents. This rough diamond from Botswana has a sulfide inclusion.
Tag Archive: rocks
This Brazilian agate looks just like an ocean sunset. Photo by Jack Hoque.
This magical moment was captured on January 10, 2017 in Queensland, Australia: “I am a female boulder opal miner in outback Queensland. In this video, I share one of the most amazing moments that I get to experience with my team; exposing an opal and being the first person on the planet to gaze upon its natural beauty. To find, extract and split a raw boulder opal is simply like no other experience. At our ethically sustainable mining site, we split boulder opal along the opal vein running though ironstone rock every day, if we’re lucky. This boulder opal that we split open has gem grade black opal inside.”
Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), Australia, by photographer Ignacio Palacios.
Kurt Steiner set the world record for skipping stones by hurling a rock at the water and making it skip an astonishing 88 times. How is that even possible? WIRED‘s Robbie Gonzalez got coaching from Steiner to find out how he does it — and looked into fluid dynamics and physics to see whether we’ve reached the limit for skipping stones.
An agate “landscape.”
An agate “desert scene.”
This is lightning ridge black opal.
The world’s largest free-form black opal weighs 6,000 carats.
