PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
The Geology of Quartz
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Quartz crystals are often the first example of minerals that people see, and are a source of inspiration for many a young geologist. In this episode, we delve into a comprehensive discussion about quartz, a major rock-forming mineral characterized by its durability and prevalent in various geological environments. Key topics include the physical properties of quartz, the formation and identification of its different varieties like amethyst and rose quartz, and the role of titanium as a temperature indicator. The episode also highlights the use of quartz in learning and its applications in understanding geological processes. Join us as we learn about this beast of the mineral world, Quartz!
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Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
SPEAKER_01Well, talking to you is never really natural, so I think I'm a natural kind of a guy. No, you're awkward. I'm awkward? You've never been told that before.
SPEAKER_00I don't know about awkward. You're not going to be able to do that. Yeah, I'm just I think at times certainly I'm awkward, Chris. Um but you're agitated. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, go for it.
SPEAKER_02I I just turned 53. Okay. Oh. And a friend of mine- don't look a day over 60, Chris. I know. Well, that's funny you say that because a friend of mine pops his head into my class while I'm teaching. Okay. Anyway, he um he's a funny guy. He's standing in my doorway, and I'm like, okay, I know what you're gonna do. Go ahead. Say what you want to say. And he's like, Well, no, no, no. I uh I'm just I'm just wondering, is today 59 or is it 60? And so I I just I stopped and I looked at my class and I'm like, you t you tell me what am I? Am I 59 or am I 60? And what'd they say? They were pretty much evenly split between 59 and 60. 59 and 60, yeah. I'd be like, one kid thought 70, and then a couple of them caught on, and they're like, Oh no, Mr. Boys, you're uh 45, 45 tops. 45 at most, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's funny. I mean, I do remember in high school, you know, any adult was ancient. Like adults were in it in a single category of old people, right? And uh I'd be curious to know what your students, without any prompting, how old they thought you were, how old they thought I was, too.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I'd be very curious to to to know I think they think I'm really, really old.
SPEAKER_00Like yeah, they probably would say I'm 49 or you're 50 or something.
SPEAKER_02Like we're basically the same age. Well, I come out on the better end of that spectrum. I'll tell you that. Like that's that's yeah. No, I don't think so. But you're right though. I I remember this too. I I thought my teachers were were just old and and then you I I still think that happens to me.
SPEAKER_00Um, like I'll get every time every once in a while I'll see a student outside of you know the classroom. And they always kind of look at me weird. It's sort of like you know, there's a zoo creature has escaped the zoo. Like, what is my professor doing not in the classroom?
SPEAKER_02So I think there's not professing, you know, he's not tapping stuff up, you know, out in the natural world of running wild. I know, it happens all the time. That's why I don't like to go out to eat anywhere near you know the city of Hudsonville because um I get hijacked all the time, you know, and and it's just I don't like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you can't escape it. Uh Chris, before we get into it, we have uh a couple, I would say a couple congratulations to give to some listeners. So this goes out to Daniel and Edward, who both emailed us, and this is really nice, this this is not a new phenomenon, but we just thought we should probably, you know, I think we should mention it. These guys both passed professional geology exams of various kinds and just wrote us a little note thanking us for the podcast. I mean, I don't think this was I don't think the podcast was their primary study guide, but um they mentioned how much it kind of helped as an accessory learning, let's say. So despite the fact that you and I just kind of randomly blab around about geology, it turns out so some of the information is actually practically useful to people, which is always good to hear. So congrats, gentlemen, on that. That's a a big accomplishment. Thanks for the note uh highlighting that. Yeah, that's awesome. Way to go. Well done. Yeah, Chris, today is the geology of quartz. So, how do you feel about the geology of quartz compared to the geology of Garnet? As far as you know it's an interesting question.
SPEAKER_01Weedy, I didn't think about that.
SPEAKER_00In terms of what? I don't know, weediness.
SPEAKER_02You gave me hard time for my uh you're you are gonna get weedy. Again, this is this is your baby, you know, the series that we're doing, or mini-series, if you want to call it that. I just wonder if half of our audience just went to sleep when you say that we're gonna talk about the geology of quartz today. I don't know. Um that doesn't sound very like appetizing, maybe.
SPEAKER_00I I don't know, but okay. Well, pitch me, Chris. Wake up, listener, and and Chris is gonna pitch us properly here on this topic.
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, Jesse, you and I have I think some well, I do. I I guess I don't really know. I have what I would call museum quality quartz specimens. I have some really, really good stuff, and it's exciting to me. I when I put that on my on my wall, I I can't at that point I can't ever move. I'm I'm here. I you know, but otherwise I'd have to chisel that out and put a piece of like leverite in its place, you know.
SPEAKER_00And you have to say, Jenny, don't clean this, you know, because you're gonna break it. Don't clean my rock wall with quartz in it.
SPEAKER_02Yes, true. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So um I agree, Chris. Quartz is incredibly important. Well, it's really interesting, it's really prevalent. I think quartz is a mineral that gets people into the field of geology, like you know, the sort of early days when you find a quartz crystal, when some little kid or when you're an adult, my wife, for instance, finds a quartz crystal, it's like, oh, this is great. This is so cool, it's so pretty, kind of draws you into wanting to learn more. And so that's part of the value of this episode that we're gonna do. And just to highlight this, this is in a series where we have a lot of images, we're gonna talk about images. If you want the images and we think they add a lot of educational value, you can find this on the app in the Planet Geo podcast, part of our Camp Geo app. That's the first link in your show notes. You can get this podcast with all the images as well. So we're gonna talk about some images here. We're gonna try and make sure that the podcast, you know, if you're listening to this on the podcast feed, you can still understand it without the images. But it's a beautiful mineral and it deserves some visuals, we think.
SPEAKER_02So all right, Jesse. So should we jump in and start with some of the basics on the beautiful mineral quartz? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Let's do it. Let's do it. Right. Well And I know, Chris, we had a we had a discussion about how to frame this. You know, what's the pitch going into this? Because oxygen and silica are two of the most well, they are the two most abundant elements in Earth's crust, but we have a different I think we have a different way of talking about this in class. Like you talk about it differently than I do. I think your way's better, so why don't you of course, obviously. Goes without saying.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I don't know. I I like it this way. You and I had a little argument about it, and but to your credit, you you weren't married to your idea, and you were like, oh yeah, you know, maybe you're right on that. That's maybe a better way of thinking about it. So I appreciate you for that. But there are many different ways of thinking about the elements that are present in the Earth's crust, you know, and you can look at it by the percentage of atoms, you can look at it by volume, you can look at it by weight, and to me, it just made sense to look at it by just percentage of the atoms that are in the crust, the most abundant atoms.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Chris, let me just clarify that though those different ways, each atom, like we have one silica atom, one oxygen atom, those atoms have different weights. They also have different volumes. So we can take the number of atoms and we can say, okay, but how much of the weight of the earth of the crust is silica? Because silica weighs more than oxygen, right? So that's what that's why people would do that. But I think you're right. Thinking about it in terms of number of atoms is the best. And image number one is just a pie chart that highlights oxygen and silica here. But Chris, what are the numbers for oxygen, silica, and other you know, elements that we care about in number of atoms? That's the really important thing. I agree. It's the better way to explain it.
SPEAKER_02So and I think it's the better way, and I'll I'll kind of like get into this in a second, but the atoms are in the crust. Now, this varies because you have different kinds of crust, you have oceanic crust, you have continental crust. So these these numbers are in a general sense, right? But in the crust, we have about 60% of the atoms are oxygen, and 20% of the atoms are silicon. Well, first of all, that's shocking because that means 80%-ish of all of the atoms in the crust of the earth are either silicon or oxygen. And so that means that by default, the silicate minerals are going to be the dominant mineral group that exists in the crust of the earth. That's right.
SPEAKER_00The big dogs, yeah. They're they're very prevalent. They of all the rock-forming minerals, the 10 or 15 rock-forming minerals ones we say these are the most important minerals to know. The vast majority of them are silicates. I mean, calcite is maybe the only one that's not or yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_02Right. And all of the Bowens reaction series minerals are silicates, also. Yeah. But here's the thing, and this is why I think it was important, why we had our little mini argument, if you will, about how to talk about this, is because all of the silicates, the building block of it is a pyramid. It's a siO4. You put a silicon atom in the middle, you put a pyramid of oxygen atoms around it, and you get this tetrahedron, if you will. All of them have that. But it's not a four to one ratio that you have. And you alluded to it before. We call geologists interchangeably call quartz silica. We use that all the time. We just kind of flip-flop back and forth because in our minds it's the same thing, which is a reference to SiO2. So the building block of quartz is that tetrahedron, SiO4. So, how do you get, Jesse, a tetrahedron that has a ratio of SiO2?
SPEAKER_00This, we've talked about this, and I'll point to our Camp Geo content on the app in a minerals chapter. We talk about silica tetrahedrons, have some images there. So if you're kind of not remembering what a silica tetrahedron is, you can go there and look at those images and help you understand this. But these are the building blocks of all the silicate minerals. Quartz, as you said, Chris, has this formula siO2, and we need to have SiO2 because of the charge balance. Silica has a four plus charge, it's a cation, so it's rah-rah positive. Did I do that okay? Well, yeah, you did actually. That was good. I like that.
SPEAKER_02Because you actually gave me the positive balance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the knitting line, rah-rr. Um, it's a positive cation, four plus charge. Oxygen is a two minus anion, so we need two two minuses to equal minus four, which then balances, right? So we need a balanced thing to build a mineral structure, and siO2 is balanced. So what you're describing there is we have silica tetrahedrons that are all connected, so we've got this pyramid thing, and all the corners are being shared so that the entire thing balances out. It's the simplest way to combine silica and oxygen in silica and oxygen only together, and that's the important thing. We don't need any other cations in the mix to balance this thing.
SPEAKER_02That's right. So if you have an SiO4 and another SiO4, and all of the oxygens are being shared with nearby SiO4s, that brings the overall ratio down to SiO2. But the reason why I think it's important to talk about this 60 to 20 ratio of oxygen to silicon is because it's just an opportunity to bring in a little bit of chemistry in context to my class. Because you start talking about, you know, how do you get we have a three to one ratio of oxygen to silicon, but yet you have these tetrahedrons, that's the building block of all silicate minerals. How do you think this happens? And it brings in this, you know, maybe a 15-20 minute discussion that talks about the chemistry that you just kind of highlighted. And I, you know, I think that you we've talked about this before, right? Whenever you can teach chemistry in context, that's important. And it's it's just fun, you know, to get them thinking about wait a second, yeah, we got a problem. Yeah, we have a three chemistry show.
SPEAKER_00Geochemistry is so fun when you can apply it to stuff. I agree completely. So quartz is SIO2. We talk about this in the intro to geology all the time. Quartz is really important mineral, it's occurs in many different rock types. We'll touch on that, but it has some really important and very key properties that help us identify quartz. Chris, what are the main physical, what we would call physical properties of quartz that help you identify this as quartz?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, I mean, the thing to me that stands out with quartz, what I really want to drive home with them is that quartz is a beast. Both physically and chemically, it's a beast. It's something to definitely be you you have to come to grips with how stable this mineral is. On the Mo scale of hardness, which is this one to ten scale of of hardnesses, with you know, one being the softest, ten is the hardest, and diamond is a ten out of ten, quartz is a seven on the scale, and there aren't many minerals that are yeah, that are that hard. And and that's a tribute, right? The hardness of the mineral is a tribute to the strength of the chemical bonds that hold this thing together. Totally, totally.
SPEAKER_00That's a a really key part to quartz, and it lasts. We'll talk about this. It's very common in the crust because it can last throughout all these processes. It's chemically stable, it's physically stable. So it just, as you said, it's a beast, it just survives.
SPEAKER_02And the other thing is I was just gonna say that the other thing about it is the chemical stability of it. That's the other thing that I want to really drive home with my students, is it's really hard physically and mechanically, but it's also chemically very stable. It's not very soluble, it will not react, it won't go into solution very easily, even if the water is hot and salty and acidic, like it just not a lot happens to it. It it's able to stand up again to that, which is again a tribute to the you know, chemical stability, the uh the strength of the chemical bonds, and they're very durable. And so those are the two things because Jesse, a long, long time ago, one of my favorite episodes, and I think you too, I had to actually sell you on this, was the the the episode that we did in our podcast on sand. You know, the fact that only the strong survive. And and that's what we're talking about is a beach that is you know in excess of 90% quartz sand. There's not a lot of other stuff there because the further the erosion process goes, all the weak minerals they get either mechanically destroyed or chemically dissolved. They just don't stand up well, and you're left then with only the strong survive, which is quartz. And and so that that chemical stability is another really important part about it.
SPEAKER_00And it speaks to the chemistry, you know, this this sort of silica tetrahedron. All these tetrahedrons are shared together, making it really, really durable. Uh, Chris, another feature of quartz, physical property of quartz, is it's a six-sided prism, the crystal shape. When it grows a perfect crystal shape, and this is image number two, shows a really beautiful cluster of quartz crystals. And uh, you know, if we want another one, we could just go take a photo on Chris's rock wall of a quartz cluster here that's museum quality, uh self-proclaimed. Museum quality.
SPEAKER_02It is self-proclaimed, it is self-proclaimed for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you can see the plaque right beneath it. Museum quality, quote, CRISPL eyes. Um, no, but this is it, it is a beautiful mineral, and I think this is where people, you know, if you go to any rock shop, you're gonna find you can buy little people, little quartz crystals, big quartz crystals, but they all look like this. They're a six-sided prism, which is useful to identify it if you have the crystal shape, and we don't always have the crystal shape. So, Chris, the next physical property is is one that I think is most useful in identifying quartz in rocks. Do you agree with that?
SPEAKER_02I absolutely do. You're referring to the concoidal fracture of quartz, which is I think a lot of our listeners, a lot of people in general, are familiar with the rock, not the mineral, but the rock obsidian. And obsidian is just this classic it's the property of obsidian that makes obsidian the MVP of rocks, actually, is the fact that it does have this concoital fracture, which is a very curved break on it. If you think about like a very thick pane of glass and you break the pane, or uh like a very thick Coke bottle and you break it, the broken surface is going to be this kind of curved surface, which comes to then very sharp, jagged edges where it meets the unbroken surface. And that makes it the MVP because it makes it uh at least for obsidian anyway, it's beautiful then for scraping, you know, things like hides and and shovels and making tools and weapons like arrowheads and spearheads and things like this. So quartz also has that property, that kind of concoital fracture to it, that curved break.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So if you break, if you compare breaking felt bar, which will break along flat, it will what's called cleave, it'll break along flat planes. So those planes will kind of flash at you versus quartz, it'll break along this curved surface, Chris. And as you've described, I think you kind of rotate the rock or the mineral in light, and it'll roll, the light will roll across these conchoidal fractures as opposed to flash off of crystal faces. And this really, again, comes down to the crystal structure. We have all these tetrahedrons that are all sharing oxygens with each other. It makes it a very strong and homogenous crystal structure. There's no weak planes in it, where as feldspars, we're we have different cations in there that make weak planes in the crystal structure that allow when a break happens, it usually breaks along that surface. So quartz doesn't have that.
SPEAKER_02So anyway, yeah, that's what I was I was trying to interrupt you there, Jesse. You weren't having it. I was trying to like I wanted to ask the listeners why do you think a mineral like feldspar would cleave and and quartz doesn't? And and you but you got to it. You know, it's the tendency of a mineral to have this predictable break. Feldspar has two directions of cleavage at nearly 90 degree angles, and that's a totally predictable way that that feldsbar will break. And the reason is is because those are the directions where it has weaker chemical bonds holding it together, whereas quartz doesn't. Quartz, all the bonds are the same strength, and so you know it doesn't have a weak link. And so the way it breaks is totally unpredictable and random.
SPEAKER_00Totally random, yeah. Um, a couple other physical features, it's vitreous, which is uh I think Chris, it's a hard one to explain, but it's kind of this this sheen, oily sheen or kind of uh iridescent sheen um on the sur what's that?
SPEAKER_02No, keep going. That's interesting. I I don't describe it that way. I don't think of vitreous actually as that way.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. How do you how do you describe vitreous?
SPEAKER_02I describe it as glassy like. Oh, okay. I know what you're saying. You you some sometimes when you break quartz or you break glass, you do get that iridescent, you know, kind of bluish and greenish like sheen on it. You know, it looks like an oil slick kind of.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, weak, very weak iridescence. It's not I wouldn't call it, yeah, it's like sometimes you get that.
SPEAKER_02I don't, I just don't I think of it more as being vitreous as glassy. That's how I describe it to my students.
SPEAKER_00It looks greasy, which is a hard thing because greasy is uh more of a feel, but it looks like it would feel greasy, right? Uh, that's a good helpful identifier of quartz as well. And it comes in many, many different colors, and we're gonna talk about a few of those colors, Chris. So maybe we should move on from the physical properties here. Color, as we've talked about before in many podcasts and the Camp Geo content, color is a terrible way to identify minerals. Don't rely on it because we'll talk about this. Quartz comes in many different colors. One thing I want to highlight, Chris, that comes back to the chemistry, and then we can kind of stop belaboring the chemistry point, maybe, is that quartz occurs in a ton of different rock types on Earth, but it has to be enriched. Like quartz doesn't form in the mantle, quartz doesn't form in peritotite or in basalt. And the reason that quartz doesn't form in those rocks is because there's enough other atoms, enough other cations to bond with oxygen that you don't need to have a mineral that's pure silica in oxygen. So back to those silica tetrahedrons, the rock has to have what's called excess silica in order to form quartz in it. Because otherwise, you'll have these silica tetrahedrons that bond with sodium or calcium or magnesium. They bond with magnesium, make olivine. The silica tetrahedrons add with calcium and they make pyroxines, or they, you know, add with magnesium iron, a whole bunch of other crap and form biotite. So when you have a complicated recipe, you can form a bunch of different minerals. You don't need to make quartz, but when you drive up the silica content high enough to due to partial melting and distillation of the earth, then you get free silica, free SiO2. You have too much SiO2, too many silica tetrahedrons around where there's not enough other cations available, and it makes quartz, then.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that's a really good point. And I think about it this way that the deeper you go in the crust and then you get into the mantle, just basically going through the deeper you go, you progress towards more of these metallic irons, magnesiums, calciums, and so on, sodiums that are present, you progress into that, you get more and more of that, which means then you're gonna then have those cations are gonna bond with the silica tetrahedron to create olivines and pyrixines and horn blends or you know, or amphibles and so on down the line. So the deeper you go, the more you the you get richer in metals.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And the only way you form quartz is if you run out of all the other cations in the rock. And so you you have to have a lot of silica in the magma in order to run out of all the other cations before you form quartz. And that's why quartz is kind of a late former. It also forms from hydrothermal fluids uh very commonly. A lot of the quartz we'll see with beautiful crystals forms in hydrothermal fluids and ore deposits. Chris, it's also, as you said before, it's really prevalent in sediments because it's so chemically and physically durable, it ends up on the beach and then ends up in sandstone and then quartzite. So I think you kind of covered that. Like that's why quartz is everywhere in sedimentary rocks. It's very common there. Usually forms in an igneous or hydrothermal environment, then gets eroded or deposited in sediments later on. So it's incredibly common, right? Like it's one of the rock-forming minerals, it occurs in a bunch of environments. That's kind of why, in general.
SPEAKER_02Speaking of which, Jesse, I got a I'm getting close to the point now where I have to go buy a bunch of Skittles for my class.
SPEAKER_00Oh, nice. What's the need for Skittles driven by?
SPEAKER_02Well, I use I use Skittles as because you get five colors, right, of Skittles, and I assign different minerals to them. Okay, orange is quartz, and and red is feldspar, and you know, I I just randomly pick the common minerals that that you see in the crust and and I advance the Skittles down the lab table, you know, and what happens to these other minerals the further you go. And so and in the end, you're only left with whatever color you assigned to quartz, you know, because only the strong survives.
SPEAKER_00And so I mean that's a nice exercise. It's also probably your favorite exercise because you get to go home with a whole bunch of Skittles.
SPEAKER_02I do. I love Skittles, yes. Skittles.
SPEAKER_00It's one of the major food groups in the Bullheise Household, the Skittles. Doritos and Skittles go a long way. Doritos is the picture of healthiness over there. Um so I I think you know, uh we we use the first one.
SPEAKER_02Hold on, I'm gonna cut you off here because you're all right, we're gonna get into now the doctory side of Professor Rymanck here because he wants to introduce you all to a new word.
SPEAKER_01And the word is piezoelectric. Hold on, Joyce, pay attention. Joyce, wake up. Wake up, Joyce. Tap the word. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00What's the word, Chris?
SPEAKER_02The word of the day. Pisoelectric is the word of the day. So, Doctor, go ahead, but I am gonna cut you off here if you get a little long in the tooth.
SPEAKER_00Well, we won't go too long. We'll turn to image number three here in our stack, which is gold, native gold deposited with quartz veins, right? This is cool. This is very, I think, stereotypical, maybe is the right word. Like if you think of gold, you think of a gold nugget or gold in quartz veins. This is the way that gold deposits form. Chris, you guys go out. Do you still go to the home stake mine in the Black Hills on SummerSign?
SPEAKER_02We we do, but we don't go, I mean, we don't go into it, obviously. We just drive past it, we talk about it, and um, there are like so many things that you can talk about in terms of the history of the home stake. I mean, it's it's a really cool story. Yeah, but yeah, and and uh Jesse, I have a uh like I have samples that look really uh very similar to the one that you're putting here on image number three. Uh, where are those from? Um Canada, McGregor Bay, up by up in Sudbury.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that this is a really common way for gold deposits to form or for gold to be kind of uh exposed in the crust is is associated with quartz. And piezoelectric, okay, what is piezoelectric? I'm gonna talk about piezoelectric because it's an interesting theory that literally just came out like this year about this association of quartz with gold, native gold deposits, in a really an ore body, enough gold that you can mine it. Quartz is piezoelectric, and what that means is that when you apply stress to the mineral, the mineral structure actually, it generates an electric charge. And this is a really useful phenomenon. This is why like quartz clocks are based on this principle that a little bit of stress applied produces an electric charge. So, I mean, we don't we all have digital watches now, but back in the day, I remember when you used to buy quartz watches that were, you know, they kept really good time in part because of this piezoelectric behavior of quartz. And also we see this association with gold and quartz in gold deposits frequently. And there's a proposal with some experimental data backing this up that would say that there's enough electric charge that if you have a fluid that is precipitating quartz out of it, like a hydro, a really hot, salty fluid that also has gold dissolved in it, it's really hard to get that gold to come out of the solution. However, if you shake it with a little earthquake or something and you apply stress to the quartz crystals that you're precipitating, boom, it can induce that electric charge can induce the gold to be deposited onto the growing quartz crystals. And I don't know if it's correct or not, it certainly needs to be tested, but it's a really interesting phenomenon in proposal.
SPEAKER_02It is. I have a thought on this. Tell me if I'm way off on this, but that makes a lot of sense. But also, if uh you you know you jiggle the fluid by because of an earthquake, let's say, but the fluids are also gonna be hanging out in the fault that was already there, because that's the the path of least resistance, and so you already are gonna have this uh a pretty high amount of fluid in that area anyway, because of that busted up zone. I don't know. Is that what do you think? Is that yeah, I think that's right.
SPEAKER_00I think these these have to be, I think you're exactly right, these have to be like really fluid-rich environments. There's kind of fluid everywhere, it's circulating around, it's really hot, it's lots of salt in them, lots of elements dissolved in them. They're under high pressure, they're super high temperature. So, yeah, it makes sense that a little bit of jiggling and stress induced could induce gold to be deposited. So, anyway, this piezoelectricity, I think, is an interesting feature of quartz, which might be really important for mineral deposit formation. And so kind of a but that's kind of a stay tuned uh type of a good job, Jesse.
SPEAKER_02You didn't get too weedy on that. Not too weedy, all right. Well, just just wait.
SPEAKER_00We're just warming up in the weeds here. We're just dipping our toe and we're gonna dive in later. Shall we get into some of the flavors of quartz then?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so many different flavors. So I think we have to start with maybe the most famous flavor, which is called amethyst quartz. Would you agree with that, Jesse?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we have to. Everybody has heard of amethyst quartz, or anybody listening to this is probably interested in geology and has might have one on their shelf. I'd be I'd be interested to know the proportion of listeners that have an amethyst on their shelf somewhere. Uh what would you guess, Chris? 50-50.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I it's a lot. I mean, or dangling from their rear view mirror, you know, in their car or something like that. Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, exactly.
SPEAKER_02It's but it's it rightfully so. It's beautiful. Uh I actually, Jesse, I picked up these. I I don't buy minerals very often. You know this about me. I like to do that.
SPEAKER_00I do know this, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I was at this flea market in a county south of where I live. Every like once a month on Sundays, they have this flea market. So Jen and I'm like, let's go check it out. This was a number of years ago, and one person had these two geodes of amethyst sitting out. I just couldn't I couldn't pass it up because it was ridiculously inexpensive. And you know, I picked up these like spectacular geodes for like a couple hundred bucks. And I was no, they were already open, they were already been cracked open. Oh, I see. Okay. Really, really, really they're spectacular. I think you've got to be.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's very cool. That's very cool. Yeah, let's get into this.
SPEAKER_02How do you get amethyst quartz, Jesse?
SPEAKER_00Well, Chris, this is a really we kind of talked about this a little bit with Garnet, but it turns out that color in minerals is really, really complicated. And to my surprise, I think, very poorly understood. Even for very famous things like amethyst quartz. I mean, amethyst quartz we have a little bit better, but it it's not a it's a really complicated thing. Many different processes can like change the color, how light interacts with the mineral structure. Many different processes can change these things. So, like, you know, what we'll talk about this. Amethyst is produced by one type of process. Rose quartz is a different one, totally different one. It actually can produce the same color with different processes. So, amethyst, Chris, has to do with the inclusions in the mineral. And there's still ongoing research into this stuff, and so it's not perfectly well understood or perfectly well accepted. Yeah, but it's not, yes, yeah. I mean, is that was that sarcasm or or uh is that?
SPEAKER_02No, I'm I'm 100% serious. Yeah, okay. This is you know, one of the most famous forms of quartz, everybody wants some. We can actually make this in the lab very, very well, these synthetic flavors of of amethyst, but we don't really understand, I think to a high degree, uh, like how this forms, and that shocks me actually. So I wasn't being sarcastic, I was being serious.
SPEAKER_00Uh okay, I I I because I agree completely. It's actually really amazing to me, and I think especially with rose quartz, but okay, the current understanding is that this purple color, iron impurities, which are you know 20 parts per million or something, that that amount of iron is very small, really, really, really small amounts of iron. If that iron gets irradiated and therefore kind of excited, irradiated meaning with X-rays, gamma rays, lots of different irradiation out there to do this irradiating of iron in quartz, it can cause these iron substitution centers. And I, Chris, we've described this before as like a you're building a brick wall with silica and oxygen, it fits beautifully together, and then you put a misshapen brick in there and it kind of distorts the wall around it. Like you put a let's say you put a hexagon brick in there, and it, you know, it's not gonna fit really well. The wall will still work, but there's gonna be a little distortion around it. That's what we kind of think about when we put these impurities into court screens. It's twisting the lattice in some way.
SPEAKER_02But just so hold on a second. This is let's let me put this in perspective. I think you talk about how ridiculously small this is, 20 parts per million. This would be like, hey Jesse, you and I are gonna go to the Penn State game on Saturday. Oh, yeah, we're gonna wear red shirts so we can find each other. But Penn State has a hundred thousand people in there. You and I are the only people wearing red, and we have to find each other using that because that's two out of a hundred thousand. That's the same as twenty parts per million. The odds of you and I being able to find each other, like how it's unbelievable to me that that as little concentration as that, as small as that is, that that can affect the color of the mineral. That's yeah, how the light's a shocking thing when you think about it and like put this in perspective, maybe.
SPEAKER_00It's very cool. I I think it's very cool. And so these things get irradiated and you kind of excite the little the distorted lattice. So again, Chris, like if we're going to, let's say we're going to the Penn State, Ohio State game and it's a Penn State whiteout game, so all the Penn State fans are in white, and you and I are the only red shirts. We're gonna there's gonna be people who avoid us we're gonna fan. No, absolutely not. But you used red. All right, let's make it Penn State, Michigan, so you feel better about yourself. We're we're wearing we're wearing the uh Michigan, you know, blue Michigan sweatshirt or something. The fans around us are gonna kind of recoil a little bit, right? We're gonna distort the lattice of the distort the lattice.
SPEAKER_02We are gonna be obnoxious. That's right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I uh my loyalty goes as far as who writes my paycheck. So I would still be cheering for Penn State. I know, I know you would. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Fair. And if and if I went with to a Penn State game with you too, Jesse, I would be cheering for Penn State.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll we'll have to do that. We're gonna get that on the calendar next year. Okay, that's that's amethyst is this irradiation of iron in the lattice. Or at least that's the same.
SPEAKER_02We need to define what that means with irradiation. And you're talking about like X-rays, gamma rays. Are there other ones? These are really high energy forms of radiation. Are there any other forms of radiation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh, you know, I I'm not entirely sure how well we understand different forms of radiation that could induce this color difference. Okay, we know the ones that do.
SPEAKER_02What's the source of these then? The the source of X-rays and gamma rays. Is this radioactive decay?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, some of it will be radioactive decay, some of it will be cosmic radiation, you know, that stuff doesn't get very deep in the earth, but it can penetrate. Um, and so yeah, I think there's there's you know all sorts of different radiation going on and passing through the earth. So different ways to excite these things. It's basically exciting the the distortion in the wall of the in the brick wall, basically. So I'm not sure how specifically we understand that. Again, going back to like what you know, this is a this is an active research field, it's not a huge research field, but it is an active one. We we're work people are working on this. So all right.
SPEAKER_02Well, Jesse, let's move on to Rose Quartz, then which is I think Rose is my favorite for a few different reasons. I I have to ask this because I don't remember if you remember this or not. I don't know if you remember this or not. But you and I went to, and we were with our good friend Andrew DeWitt. We went to the Black Hills, and the Black Hills has some spectacular rose quartz around the area. And we went to this mine, and we we found some rose quartz among a lot of other things, actually. But I picked up this big sample of rose quartz, and I'm standing there as I'm trying to walk down the talus field. Uh is like this.
SPEAKER_00We were way, I mean, we were we were hundreds of feet up a talus slope, the the former mine tailing site. So it's just scree that you know, we're up above the truck in the woods and stuff. I mean, yeah, so we're way up there.
SPEAKER_02And I'm holding this thing, you know, in front of my body, and and you guys, and I think I actually fell down. Like it caused me to like sit because I lost my balance. I sat, and you guys were just laughing uncontrollably at me. Why is that? I that was a spectacular piece of of quartz.
SPEAKER_00Chris, well, first of all, this thing was not small. This was about the size of a log. Like you know, this was a pretty, pretty decent sized. Um you today would probably not do that. You get your tractor and load it into the front end of your tractor. This was this was a serious rock, a very small amount of which was rose quartz. So it was like a big log where only like a little chip on the end was rose quartz.
SPEAKER_02It's one of my favorite ones though, because it's it's mostly milky quartz, and then you have this really bright pink corner.
SPEAKER_00That's so funny.
SPEAKER_02So you guys were ripping on me, and now I have it in my yard, and whenever I look at it, I remember you two, which doesn't make sense. Yeah, but it's just like it's really pretty, right?
SPEAKER_01I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I think uh Chris, we we thought you are working way too hard for a rock that's not that good. But you know what? Hey, at least you're happy with it, Chris. You got it out, at least you're happy with it. Yeah, um, all right. So, Jesse, what gives it the color?
SPEAKER_02Why is this?
SPEAKER_00Rose quartz, Chris, is one of these that's amazing again, because this is a really famous variety of quartz. Rose quartz, beautiful, beautiful pink rose color to it. There's a big debate. There used to be, if you read a lot of textbooks, Chris, they'll talk about titanium impurities in quartz, and that used to be pretty, I would say, the standard uh definition of why rose quartz is rose colored. It's actually not true though. There's a couple different ways to form rose quartz. Some people think that it has to do with irradiation of different impurities like aluminum or other impurities, a different, not iron, but different impurities, and those get irradiated, and then you get this rose color. And Chris, this is image number five in our stack, is this this is a beautiful picture of rose quartz. We've been banging out about rose quartz. So look at the picture, image number five, it's spectacular. Chris, a bunch of people started to just dissolve rose quartz with acid, and you got to use a pretty strong acid to dissolve quartz. But they use started dissolving rose quartz and acid and found a really interesting what's called a borosilicate mineral. It's like a boron-rich silicate mineral that is Diddy Mortiorite, and it uh this called a couple different names. I don't know if I'm entirely pronouncing that correctly, but it's this really fibrous boron-rich mineral, boron, aluminum, silica, oxygen, that actually they think fibers of this little tiny fibers give it this rose color tint to it, and that's probably the main way. And this was Chris in the late 90s that people started talking about this. That's astonishing, again, astonishing to me. The late 90s were just working out the color process if in rose quartz it.
SPEAKER_02When you call it a borosilicate, what does that mean? Is it a boron like inclusions in the silicate structure?
SPEAKER_00No, it'll be boron plus silicate, you know, silica tetrahedrons are the constituent part. It's also called do mortierite, Chris, and this is like a lot of aluminum. The formula is super good. AL, AL2O, AL2O2, SiO4, BO3. There's a boron group, the boron oxygen group in the mineral structure. So aluminum, silicate, tetrahedrons, and boron is kind of the main and these are hydrothermal.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. But uh then again, you know, you come back to when you talk about the usefulness of this in science and and you know, quartz takes in these trace elements, one of which is titanium in this, right? If that's the case, because titanium fits in the in the structure really well, it fits in the wall very well. It's a good brick, right? So if if we're coming back to titanium, why are you discounting titanium as the cause for the rose color then? I guess that's my question.
SPEAKER_00We see titanium in a bunch of different other quartz that is not rose quartz. So maybe is that a good transition step to talk about to get into some science? Because titanium in quartz is really useful for science. Is that okay to make that transition?
SPEAKER_02I did well, Jesse. I'm an expert at throwing segues your way. So yeah, let's segue to the next Segway Award, nominee Chris Bullheis is the winner. Um again, self-nominated, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, but you know what? It's our podcast, so we can self-nominate. Self-proclaimed best geology podcast with Chris and Jesse. Um okay, quartz, you said it perfectly. Titanium fits really well into the structure of quartz. So we see a lot of quartz with titanium in it, and that is a really valuable association. Chris, I'm gonna point to image number six here, which is a little gif that shows a very, very, very cool variety of quartz, which is called rutilated quartz. All it means, and the zoom in in that gif, is zooming in on these needles of rootil. Rutil is a mineral TiO2. It's basically quartz-like, except it has titanium instead of silica as the the cation. Rahra, positive cation. Um so I was pleased at that, and I got the reaction, same reaction I get from students. A little light chuckle in the background, and then mostly just a dead root.
SPEAKER_02I think I'm confusing your rrrr for uh rah-rah. You know, you need to do better.
SPEAKER_00I need I I need to listen to the Penn State Nittany line roar a little bit more. Okay. Yeah. Premise. So, Chris, the this rutilated quartz, this is like quartz with ruteal needles in it, intergrowing with it. And this is very, very interesting for a couple reasons. Titanium fits into quartz, and we talked about how if you throw a different brick into the brick wall, it distorts the lattice, right? And titanium, although it fits in pretty well, it's not perfect, it does distort the wall. And Chris, if you had to guess, and I said there's quartz with lots of titanium in it and quartz with not much titanium in it, which one would form at higher temperature? Lots of titanium in the brick wall or a little bit of titanium in the brick wall?
SPEAKER_02At higher temperature, lots of titanium.
SPEAKER_00Okay, perfect. You're exactly right. Why? Why is that?
SPEAKER_02Why do you say at higher temperature Because it it doesn't fit perfectly? This is my thought process. You and I have not discussed this, so this is just me winging it. But but at high temperature, you have um you have more movement of the the bricks and the wall are moving and vibrating and and and kind of like uh trying to get this separation, creating more room. I guess that's my thought.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly right. That's beautiful, that's exactly right. So the more these bricks, you know, our brick wall, as we heat up the brick wall, it starts the bricks start to vibrate and they're bonded, the bonds are vibrating together. So the more vibration is occurring, the more it can accommodate these distortions, these lattice distortions. So that principle right there, it makes titanium incredibly useful to us as geologists. Titanium in quartz, because we can go, people have calibrated this experimentally and said we can measure the amount of titanium in quartz. Is it 20 parts per million? Is it 40 parts per million? Is it two parts per million? And that is temperature sensitive. So if we measure low titanium concentration, it means the quartz formed at low temperature. Lots of titanium, it means it formed at high temperature.
SPEAKER_02So that's really cool, Jesse, because that's like giving geologists another really important piece of the story. You're bracketing temperature conditions then based upon the titanium content of the quartz. That's really cool.
SPEAKER_00So let me ask you a follow-up question. It's totally cool. And this is like, you know, this is this is what people do, researchers. Mike Ackerson uh is an expert in titanium in quartz. We've had him on the podcast. Friend of the pod. Okay, so let me ask you a follow-up question here, Chris. Blue quartz is quite similar to this rutilated quartz. You've have you seen blue quartz before? I have some. Where did you get it?
SPEAKER_02So I I have some, I can't remember because this actually the blue quartz that I have came from my Earth Science mentor in high school, and he was a quartz guy.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's interesting. So blue quartz is this, it's beautiful. It's this little pale, kind of bluish color, right? It's very common in Virginia, it's in the Appalachians, it's pretty common, you know, once you get down into New Jersey and uh Connecticut and down in Virginia. Blue quartz is very similar to rutilated quartz, it's got little tiny rutile needles in it. So let me ask you this question: how do you think that that formed? How do is this high temperature or low temperature quartz? Quartz with root needles in it, which is titanium.
SPEAKER_02I would say that's very uh because rootil is titanium rich, I would say it's very high temperature quartz, then yeah, that's exactly right.
SPEAKER_00And so this is extremely high temperature. We're talking eight, nine hundred degrees. And what this tells us, Chris, these needles didn't form initially in the quartz. The quartz grew and took in a ton of titanium at high temperature. So our brick wall is really high temperature. We're shoving titanium pieces into the brick wall. It's vibrating like crazy, so it can accommodate that. As the brick wall cools down, as the quartz grain cools down, it starts to slow down the vibrations, meaning that these titanium atoms that are distributed throughout the wall, they're no longer happy, it's no longer stable. And so what happens is what we call exolution. Those titanium atoms get kicked out of the wall and they have to go together to form titanium oxide to form rutile. So these rutile needles are exalved out of high temperature quartz. So it tells us if you see blue quartz or if you see rutilated quartz, it means that that quartz crystal used to exist at really high temperature, it formed. At really high temperature. And then as it cooled down, those needles exalved out. Like it's a solid process. It's very, very cool.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. Jesse, I have a question though. Um, so a long time ago in my college days, I collected and I still have root eal crystals that I got from Arkansas. I have them in a this is gonna date me. But they're they're in a film canister.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes. Excellent. The classic mineral collector's toolkit of film canisters. That's amazing. Yeah. Root teal needles from Arkansas. Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Near magnet cove. Um yeah, okay. So, how do you get then just regular root crystals that don't form in quartz that aren't related to the code?
SPEAKER_00So you can get root root can grow in igneous rocks in in a lot in some sort of they're less common. They're certainly not as common as like zircon or quartz or anything like that, but you can get them in igneous rocks. Rutil grows in metamorphic rocks as well. It doesn't always grow associated with quartz like this rutilated quartz, but if it's growing inside of quartz or if it's present inside of quartz, it points to that quartz being really high temperature. So we can look at this blue quartz in Virginia and up in New Jersey and say the Appalachian erogeny was very hot. These rocks were hot at depth, they got heated up to really high temperatures during the metamorphic process. And the last thing, Chris, if you'll allow me to go a little bit more into the weeds. Okay. Image number seven shows another way in which we use titanium. And so this is diffusion. If you think, okay, how if you're sitting there thinking, okay, I'm trying to picture this, there's a quartz grain growing, has a ton of titanium in it because the lattice is vibrating. Then as that lattice cools down and stops vibrating so much, the titanium is unhappy, and you're thinking, well, how does it get kicked out? How does it how does it actually form these canal?
SPEAKER_02Because I I want like our listeners to think about that. Like, why would that be the case? That it's put in the wall at high temperatures, and then it gets kicked out later on because, as you said, it gets unhappy to use an unscientific term. Well, if you think about why that might be the case, well, minerals are most stable when they exist in the conditions in which they form. And so the further away you get from that, the less stable they get. Does that make sense? Yeah, if you think about if you think about like olivine compared to quartz, both of them are silicate minerals. Olivine forms in really, really high temperatures. So olivine at the surface of the earth, that's a long ways away from the conditions in which it formed. So it's less accurate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good way to pray. I like that. I like that phrasing. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Right. And the same thing is going on with titanium or routilated quartz. Yes, okay.
SPEAKER_00That's right. So as it kind of, as you said, it becomes unhappy, it's not stable, it's at different temperature, and it's getting kicked out of the quartz structure. You have to think, well, it used to be kind of this disaggregated blend. It's like Chris, you and I at the uh at the Penn State game, if we're wearing blue shirts, at first we're just kind of randomly distributed amongst the stadium. But over time, the Penn State fans kind of kick us out and we get aggregated into a little section of Michigan fans or something like that.
SPEAKER_02The further Michigan gets ahead, the less happy the Penn State fans are.
SPEAKER_00We're gonna have to stop using this analogy. I'm gonna get fired from my job here. Uh if we keep on this trend. But um exactly you can kind of think of that. Like if everybody's just start swapping seats randomly, you know, the the Michigan fans are gonna start aggregating over the pension. They're kicking us out of the wall. Exactly, right? This is what we call diffusion. If everybody just starts swapping seats, if the bricks in the brick wall just start randomly switching around, diffusion doesn't create chemical boundaries, as I described, it's not gonna aggregate titanium one spot, but it'll move. That's how things move, is they move down a concentration gradient. So image number seven shows a gif of this process. If we imagine on the x-axis here, we've got distance in a quartz vein where we're just plotting titanium concentration in a quartz crystal. So let's imagine it's a low temperature.
SPEAKER_02I would just real quick, before you go into this, Jesse, I want to just reiterate something that on this GIF, the core is a reference to the core of the mineral, the center of the mineral, not the core of the earth. And the rim is the edge of the mineral or the edge of the crystal that we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00That's a really good point, Chris. We're talking on the scale of microns here, like tiny, tiny, tiny length units here. It's very, very small. So let's say the quartz grew initially at low temperature, and you nailed it, low temperature has low titanium concentration. So initially, there's not much titanium in quartz, and then we heated up the magma, and the magma, you know, maybe it's an injection of new magma heated it up, and more quartz grew but had higher temperature, higher titanium concentration. So there's this big like step, go from low titanium, jump up, and then high titanium. Okay, then that quartz crystal sits there. And let's say it sits there for in the case of something like the rocks in the Tuali Neon Trusa suite and the Sierra Nevadas out in Yosemite National Park, they sit there for 90 million years. That titanium will diffuse. It'll go from the high temperature side as the atoms are swapping back and forth, you'll end up with going from high concentration to low concentration. It'll kind of soften that step. It's kind of, I don't know, Chris, like you're sanding down.
SPEAKER_02That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You're kind of softening the edges as things diffuse. They kind of relax that gradient, what we call that gradient. It's not a big step, a vertical, a vertical step there. It kind of gets tilted and sloughs down. It's like an old deck, maybe in the front of your house. Like it starts to sag a little bit and get rounded corners. Yeah, exactly. And so the rate at which elements diffuse depends on time and temperature. So higher temperature, they diffuse faster. Over longer times, more diffusion happens. So if we know temperature, we can solve for time. If we know time, we can solve for temperature. And it gets into this iterative thing, but this has been done. This is an incredibly powerful tool. People look at volcanic quartz, quartz that is formed in volcanoes, by looking at the quartz diffusion profiles in the quartz grain. So you got a quartz grain growing in magma chamber, it erupts onto the surface, grows a little rim in the lava, and then you look at the diffusion along that area, that boundary. So you said a lot there, okay.
SPEAKER_02What I would like you to do is exactly. What is the 20-second takeaway from this GIF?
SPEAKER_00So this GIF shows an example of how this diffusion would relax, how these this concentration gradient would soften. And we can use that, we can use the softening of this to solve for time. We can say, how long did this process happen and at what temperature? So we can use again, quartz is common in many different rock types. It occurs in igneous rocks, volcanoes, and we can use hydrothermal vents, we can use this, this type of process to say how long and at what temperature did this thing form. Okay, and one example, Chris.
SPEAKER_02I love that. When I because when I first looked at this GIF, I was like, come on, Jesse, really seriously. I I was like, This is it is complicated, but not when you put it that way. It's helping us understand the thermodynamics. It's uh, you know, how did this body cool off? And again, this is just one tool in our toolbox to start developing this this history, this story. You're not just gonna use that to piece it together, the Tuolumni suite in the Sierra Nevadas, but it is one tool that you're gonna use, you know. And I just think that the complexity of this of doing this kind of work, I I'm excited by it. I think this is so cool. So you won me over.
SPEAKER_00Geochemists have a big toolbox, and it's a very fun toolbox to poke around in and look through. And this is just one aspect, Chris. One one little story, you know, pegmatite. So you and I have looked at the edamine famous spagyumine pegmatite, the spodgamine crystal in the wall, right? This car, I mean, this is like a it's an SUV-sized single pegmatite spogamine crystal, right? People have looked at pegmatite quartz grains. They're not that big, but they're big. They're like you know, boulder-sized quartz grains in a pegmatite. And using this diffusion profile method, they've determined that some parts of that quartz grain grew at a rate of meters per day. Some parts of these pegmatite minerals, these big minerals that form in these pegmatite deposits, are growing meters per day. I've seen people give talks where they, you know, you got a big projector up uh, you know, on a slide projector up on the wall, and they put a little growth pathway. So over the course of their talk, their 12-minute talk, they'll show a little trajectory of the mineral growing at the rate it would be displayed on the wall. So over the course of 12 minutes, you would sit there and watch this thing grow. It's incredible how fast some of these minerals grow, and the detection of that growth rate is based on this scientific method, this using diffusion to measure these things. So it's I mean, it's that's just a it's a cool one-off story, but uh it's a it's a cool toolkit.
SPEAKER_02Hey, I have an idea, Jesse. You know, we did this series on the Earth's oldest rocks. I would like to add an episode to that series about the toolbox, about like this. What if we used let's say the Tuolemy suite as an example and uh just I interview you basically asking you what tools and then just a maybe five-minute discussion on each of the tools, what tools could you use to piece this the geologic story of of that rock together?
SPEAKER_00Uh that sounds very fun. Yeah, that sounds very fun, and uh I'll be honest, I we'd have to interview some people because there's a lot of tools I don't know about that other geologists, you know, are very good at. Everybody kind of has their own toolbox and or some tools specifically too. So I think that sounds great. That sounds super fun to do.
SPEAKER_02Um, because I kind of keep coming at this from the angle of all of the misconceptions that surround the way that we do geochronology, you know, things like this. And and I know a lot of our listeners are like, yeah, they don't have a problem with that at all, or you know, but but I I still think for me that's a useful exercise. You know, I think that'd be fun.
SPEAKER_00I I really do I think that'd be really cool. Yeah, take a take a rock suite and let's just go through the toolkit. What's been applied? What have people done to these very like in the twelve mini is a really good one because these are famous rocks. This is like this is the type location for granites forming, basically. Like they've been studied since the 40s. Yeah, so maybe we'll get all the different tools. That'd be really fun.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so if the listeners want that, like send give us some feedback on that. Send us an email saying yes, S P. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Now, we're uh Chris, we're uh I guess we're recording this on our on our break, but we're sort of planning you know season five at the moment. And so so series like this that that people are interested in would be really good to hear from people. So all right, Chris. Well, that was Weedy. Sorry for the weedy end there, but we can poke our heads up out of the weeds and let's just do a quick review here. Quartz is really it's just a cool mineral. I like the way you said it. It's just an absolute beast. It forms an igneous and hydrothermal rocks, but it survives all sorts of chemical and physical erosion, so it ends up in sediments all over the place. Beautiful minerals associated with gold deposits. We talked about amethyst and rose quartz and how they're associated with inclusions in the in the rocks. Then we talked a bunch about titanium and quartz and how that's a temp a temperature-sensitive thing that allows us to tell the history of individual quartz grains really well. So there's a lot we also didn't cover with quartz. So, again, listener, if you're interested in some aspect of quartz that we did not cover, we're happy to to cover more. We just kind of we just decided we're to cut it off based on our preferences a little bit, right? Um, there's a lot out there on quartz. So yeah. Absolutely. Is that a wrap, Chris? I think that's a wrap, Jess. All right, sounds good. Hey, there's many ways to support us. First of all, you can go to our Camp Geo mobile app. First link in your show notes. There you can find this episode with all the images available to you. So click on that link down below the campgeo app to check it out. Let us know what you think about that as well. We're kind of experimenting a little bit with things on there. So if you go and listen to this episode with the images, let us know if you think it's valuable, if you liked it better, if you liked it worse, what we would change. We're kind of iterating a bunch. So let us know what you think. Send us an email planetgeocast at gmail.com, head over to the website planetgeocast.com. Cheers,