Owenahincha (it took me a while to learn the name of this place ;) ) beach is one of my favourite spots in Ireland, both for relaxing (the beach is almost always empty, and it is so beautiful) and collecting ( we always find something nice).
That day we were hoping to find some better hamatite samples, maybe some quartzes, but what we found was beyond our dreams!
First, Klaudia came across a small pocket and spent an hour taking out a single quartz cluster. This trip would be worth it even if we found this specimen ONLY.
A few undamaged tips + one crystal with flowery chlorite inclusions= a great specimen!
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| Chlorite inclusions in quartz |
Meanwhile I found
a rock with potential, I noticed a few small quartz tips sticking out of clay. I called Klaudia and we started digging carefully in the clay. We found only a few small crystals, though. However, Klaudia switched on her "crystal radar" and her "crystal nose" sniffed THAT POCKET! On top of the rock, in a place I wouldn`t even try to reach! Sometimes it helps to be tall and have long legs ;) While I was still digging a bit lower, she was taking out crystal after crystal from that big pocket! Some of them the size of a thumb, some clusters, some double terminated... All dirty, so we still didn`t know what was hidden under the clay. We were to discover it at home, after giving the specimens a few days long bath in my son`s plastic bathtub.
I first spotted this badly weathered, rotten, ugly quartz "cluster", literally falling apart in my hands. I brushed it gently and noticed some pink crystals under all this rotten, stinky stuff. I didn`t know what it was, I only knew it wasn`t quartz. It actually took over two weeks of studying the crystals before, with Thomas` help I was able to find out what it was- ALBITE!
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| Klaudia on the rock, the huge pocket with albite was higher |
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| Quartz, albite and limonite, photo taken through macro lenses for a mobile phone |
After cleaning we also realized that we have something else. What I initially considered clay turned out to be most likely limonite after pyrite and limonite after siderite.
Here are a few out of over 30 crystals and clusters from this pocket:
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| one of my favourites! |
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| Limonite pseudomorphs after pyrite |
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| quartz |
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| A beautiful, about 4cm high quartz cluster. Excellent specimen with many clear, undamaged crystals |
Thank you Thomas for editing my pictures :)
Some other, unedited photos:
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| Specimen about 3.5cm |
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| Same specimen |
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| Another nice cluster, about 3cm |
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| Albite and limonite |
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| Broken... |
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| ...but only for a while :D |
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| Another one, broken... |
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| ... and fixed :) |
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| Another favourite, here still wet after a bath in a detergent with some lemon juice (great method for removing iron, by the way) |
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I will add photos of the limonite after siderite, so come back if you are interested to see them. And also, I am currently investigating what is the pink stuff covering my crystals.
This day we went to look for hematite, but we found none. We found other treasures. But we went back to Owenahincha shortly after this trip and this time found our hematite- LOTS.OF.HUGE.HEMATITES! Check out my next post!
Hope you enjoyed :D
Well done! This looks like alpine-fissure style mineralization, and occurs at various points around the SW coast of Ireland. Typically the crystals occur in cavities in ribbon-like tension gashes in the sandstones. Usual associates (at least in the Irish examples) are chlorite-group minerals (clinochlore & chamosite) and micaceous or specular hematite. Rarely albite and traces of copper (as malachite stains).
ReplyDeleteHello Steve. Thank you for your comment :) We found LOTS of hematite there, too, I`ll be posting on it soon. Struggling to take proper pictures, fighting with reflections ;P Feel invited to my blog anytime :)
ReplyDeleteReading your blog is fun. That chlorite quartz is awesome.
ReplyDeleteDear Monika, Just discovered your blog while doing one of my periodic scans for cotterite on the web. I was initially startled when I saw the UCD cotterite because I recognised it immediately - I am the person who (re)discovered it in UCD and rescued it (along with the other 5,000 UCD minerals, with help from Dr. Matthew Parkes of the NMI). But I thought you might like to know three things: 1) There is a short chapter on cotterite in a book I wrote last year and still available ["648 Billion Sunrises: A Geological Miscellany of Ireland"]; 2) There are some 20 , not 4, specimens of cotterite in collections round the world, though most in Ireland and Britain; 3) I am writing a paper on cotterite where I will give the evidence for the finder as Grace Elizabeth Cotter and also provide new observations on cotterite itself and offer a new explanation for why it appears as it does {which will differ from the explanation given by Harkness (1878)}. This paper will be for the Irish Journal of Earth Sciences, and I will let you know when it comes out - next year sometime. Keep on blogging! Patrick Roycroft
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