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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thoughts about a stone on the beach.

Remind me to get your kid a rock tumbler for christmas. You'll discover that rounded pebbles are mere weeks away with the right abrasive... which leads me to conclude that rounded pebbles are the product of decades, not eons.

Beach glass is quick, man.





jleopold  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You are talking about three pretty different processes there. The rock tumbler takes only weeks because, as you said, it has the right abrasive. Also, the motion is different than would be experienced by a rock or sea glass.

Sea glass comes, unsurprisingly, from the sea. It's brought in by the surf from the ocean, where it is polished by particles suspended in the water.

The stones don't come from the ocean. They come from mountains, where active erosion is happening. They tumble, very very slowly, down streams and rivers, where they are polished not so much by the suspended particles in the water, but more by colliding with other small stones. They do this in steps, caused by floods, mudslides, or other disturbances. Over millions of years, river beds can cement into a rock grading from a conglomerate of rounded rocks towards the bottom and a breccia of angular rocks near the top. While mk's estimate of millions of years would result in these new sedimentary layers, decades is way off too. Depending on the origin, thousands to tens of thousands of years would be about right.

mk  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's a good point. Glass and granite are both about 6-7 on the Mohs hardness scale.

Even so, getting to a water's edge is still a long part of the journey. I'd love to see a timelapse of an individual stone.

As an aside, I had another thought about copper replacement agates:

They are comparably much more rare than diamonds, but far less expensive. It would be hilarious to buy every one that ever went for sale. You could probably corner the market for less than $10k.

kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My mother is big on rutilated quartz.

Me? I've always had a thing for bismuth, in no small part because it looks like the kind of mineral Syd Mead would draw but also because the only place you find it this pure is inside giant coal-fired chimneys from the dawn of the industrial era.

user-inactivated  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

HOLY FUCK I WANT THAT

tacocat  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I see ones for $66, sooo hah! Next paycheck one of those babies is goin on my table, that is one of the most aesthetically pleasing things I've ever seen.

kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

user-inactivated  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's a good point, I never thought of it that way.

kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

...yeah, don't ask me why the URL corrupted. Try it now.

user-inactivated  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

lol, it happens to me sometimes too, tho I'm usually too lazy to change it

kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

shows you how much I care!

mk  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ok. I am going to take a photo of the favorite rock I've found and post it tomorrow.

#arockifound

kleinbl00  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Does that mean I have to tell the story of the tiger eye?

mk  ·  3465 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think it does.