Mineral Mondays: Tourmaline, The Most Colorful Gemstone
Tourmaline is one of those gemstones that when you see it you can't believe your eyes. It comes in more variety of color than any other gemstone and sometimes those colors are mixed making it a bi-color, tri-color, or the ever sought after watermelon, a green exterior with a pink interior.
Tourmaline is a combination of many minerals. It's a boron silicate mineral that gets it's color from other minerals mixed in with it like lithium, aluminum, or potassium to name a few. It's fairly hard at 7-7.5 on the mohs scale, a diamond is a 10 and hardened steel is 7-8. Don't be confused though, while gemstones are hard, they can fracture easily. It's found all over the world, but the famous American localities are Southern California & Maine.
Tourmaline comes in 6 different groups:
- Schorl - the common, black variety
- Draveite - Brown
- Elbaite - Red, pink, blue, green, yellow, orange, white, brown, black and clear.
- Liddicoatite - Almost identical to Elbaite, except contains calcium.
- Uvite - Light brow, reddish, yellowish, gray, white & black
- Buergerite - Bronze to yellowish brown and black.
Schorl.
Since I live close to the mines, actually grew up in Temecula, CA which is just over mountain from the Pala district, I go to dig at the two active mines, The Oeanview Mine & The Himalaya Mine, when I am in town. The Oceanview Mine is part of the Pale Mining District and the Himalaya Mine is part of the Mesa Grande District. Neither mine allows you to mine in the tunnels, but instead bring the tailings to a designated area and let you sift through them.
Each mine is known for different gemstones. Oceanview for bluer tourmalines, aquamarine, spodumene and morganite and the Himalaya for pink tourmalines, bi-color & watermelon troumalines. The Empress of China Dowager, Cixi, was a huge lover of tourmaline and bought large amounts of it from the Pala mines in the early 1900's.
Below are some of the specimens my wife and I have dug up over the years. Enjoy.
Saves the best for last. The blue is benitoite. I still have these
This monster appeared at a gem show I was a vendor at. The owners were trying to sell it for $8,000, but their story was suspicious so no one bit. We concluded that it was probably hot and originally from Brazil. These types of specimens are rare and almost always documented. Even so, I had to hold it and get a photo.
That's it for now. Come back each and every Monday for a new mineral!
ALL PHOTOS ARE TAKEN BY ME OR MY WIFE.
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That looks very cool.
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I'm mostly curating in #science and am always glad to see quality posts like yours peeking out between the garbage and plagiarism! Especially when it's obviously original content with your own pictures.
Yes, please share away! Thank you.