‘Nick From Home’ Livestream #5 - Ellensburg Blue Agates

well good evening everybody how we doing anybody there okay Oh Kelly Tom Scott Neal hey okay it's a pleasure to have you all with us tonight plenty of familiar names great to see you thank you for checking in let me set up a couple things here and then we can chitchat a bit we're doing well hope we're doing well this might be a good one there's just a chance a chance this might be a good one well I probably jinxed it man I said this is gonna be a good one and they're like he's playing with my laptop couldn't get things to work I'm feeling better now those are framing here this I want it it's not windy tonight but I wanted to kind of batten down the hatches up there and not have that thing bounce around that's looking pretty good I think if I'm in here I got a bunch of show-and-tell of course oh I hope I don't I'm gonna pick up the camera a few times so that'll be an adventure streaming doing okay I'm almost so confident now with the streaming I'm not even asking anymore cuz it's been so good as long as I'm close to the house I think we're I think we're good thank you David we just can't paint over those frogs the boys are gone but the frogs remain streaming is good yeah a couple more from you audio/video synched up fine no delay no no warbling I think I noticed a couple quick warbles last night but otherwise we think we may have this streaming thing licked I don't really want to use data unless I have to hey there's that wildlife some of these guys know who you are anyone look right in there do you see yourself right up there do you see yourself yeah yeah what's the difference between live chat and top top chat they may know is that I can't tell a difference and I am of course hearing from people who say I can't see the comments I can't see the live comments and if that's you maybe somebody in the little room here can help you out top is not as good okay okay I want to see live comments I can't tell much of a difference there oh I'll not get all the comments but oh okay that's right I remember that now oh are you bored did you want to alright there you go there you go there you go Bisou Bisou Oh bee she gives you the cat it's being strangled now that's not Tom and selected by AI hmm okay well I guess I can do some reading on my own but see I had another question what was it can't remember I guess about data like you know we walked up to the Overlook last night and and I I got I manually uncleared got off of the Wi-Fi I'm not even sure I need to do that is that the phone automatically just kind of say okay you're leaving the Wi-Fi that you use so we'll just go to your data so I wasn't sure if I had to manually on get off the Wi-Fi turn off the Wi-Fi basically and then the other question is I guess if I do any more of those little excursions I'll be using data and I don't know how ridiculous that is cost-wise but which reminds me here's the plan going hiking tomorrow lovely wife and I we enjoy doing our yard work but after a while enough is enough time to switch it up and we've got places we hike where there really aren't any people so don't shame me please so here's the next little but you know we're just kind of going I mean come on now we're all just kind of doing this right we're all just kind of not sure what the timeline is here so in this case we'll just keep going a bunch at a time until something changes hopefully for the better so this is the next bunch this is the Tuesday Wednesday Thursday schedule we had last week Sunday night tonight I think right I heard some church bells actually about an hour ago that was nice that they were just serenading town anyway this is the plan for next Tuesday Wednesday Thursday I'll try to remember to do this at the end as well I'm trying not to post too much about this stuff but I do want to let people know what's happening I haven't bothered to look at the analytics and all that you know how many people are joining us each night and are we growing and it doesn't matter we've got we've got people on the other end for sure and that's what matters but if it was three of you it could still be fun but there's more than three this is always fun where are you viewing from tonight we'll see if we have some new places roll call please helps me actually know who I'm talking to here Nebraska Wisconsin Sweden Wenatchee Wenatchee Mount Vernon I'm reading what you can see but I guess for the folks who can't see the comments Oklahoma Netherlands Provo Malaga Graham every tel coma lots of Washington's here but we've got California New York Utah I'm picking the exotic ones now Salt Lake City Utah terrific and people from that far away tuning into UK hello Helena Montana Red Deer Alberta Marshalltown Iowa so you want to hear about these things called the Ellensburg blue agates good for you maybe you'll come maybe you'll come to our Valley one day when things are normal Smoky Mountains terrific I haven't seen my mom yet maybe she's forgotten about us tonight or maybe I didn't see it already she's been a loyal viewer from southern Wisconsin I was supposed to visit her this past week but it didn't happen we were supposed to be New Orleans tonight for spring break that didn't happen oh you're back you're back you want to say how these guys again I really appreciate you checking in with us we've got two minutes according to my watch let me collect my thoughts and we'll get started I can pick you up okay all right wearing a fur coat suddenly seriously man we gotta we gotta brush you out dog you're scooping up everything I hope you stick around yeah I hope you stick around well hello there good evening from Ellensburg Washington USA thank you for joining us hope that you enjoy the next hour we've been doing these live streams from my backyard here for a few nights and tonight's topic is Ellensburg blue agates let's get right into it I've got about thirty minutes of me in about thirty minutes of you and your questions your live questions you can see the comments scrolling by right now and if you want to hang on to the questions until I'm ready in about half an hour ish then I can go ahead and answer as many questions as humanly possible before we get to 7:00 o'clock Pacific time but you're with us you're ready to go and so mine we already have more than 200 people wonderful outstanding and I can see why this is an exciting topic let's start with this let's imagine something together it's you and your family you're walking over this beautiful field and it could be springtime there's some some desert flowers there's some bunch grass there's some sagebrush I mean it's a desert kind of a scene and especially if you're a kid your eyes are a little closer to the ground and the grown-ups so you're scanning all this stuff out in front of you maybe you're doing some full sprints across that field then you wipeout and then you pop back up and then you keep going and it's a big broad open field and in amongst all the plants there's some river rocks there's some rocks that are kind of rounded some stones and as a kid you probably want to pick up a few of those take a look you know they've run over to mom and dad show them or if you're a grown-up with some of your best friends same thing looking down looking at some loose rocks picking up some stuff that looks interesting if you're in the right part of this valley this valley is called the Kittitas Valley if you're in the right part of this valley you might pick up something that looks just like a regular stone and you come in you go okay wow this is kind of cool now I heard this was kind of an Ellensburg blue agate kinda and then you go oh ho ho hey hey get over hey get over it bees you get over here get over here hey I think it got one I think I got one I think this one's kind of bluish because you actually came well that's impressive never mind just kidding so the point is that's the expertise you need to find Ellensburg blue agates here in this valley seven years old 77 years old no tools no specific tricks just to be able to look down and pick up stones and occasionally you find something that's a blue agate and these agates depending on the quality of their blue color are valuable so it's like an Easter egg hunt but you can actually make money if you find the right Easter eggs that's a motivation for a lot of people so tonight we're in my backyard we can't be out there doing this together it wouldn't be a good use of our time anyway you can't find these blue agates every two seconds to show you unless you plant them I guess but I've got a bunch of blue agates here little show-and-tell before I take the camera and show you this is an amateurish sketch of the valley this is looking down this is a map looking down from heaven at Ellensburg Washington USA my backyard is right in that black dot south north east west the Columbia River advantage is over here the Cascades is Snoqualmie passes over here the blue agates are only in the northwestern corner of the valley so if you go out in that beautiful field than your south of Ellensburg there you're not going to find any blue agates or east or southwest whatever gotta be up in the northwest corner only that's where the loose guys are they're literally lying on the ground and each spring there's a new bats that come to the surface freeze thaw things are coming up it's like an unlimited supply so you can keep going back to the same fields over and over and over again year after year and still find new stuff even if you were sure you picked that area clean the previous year almost all of the land is private I'm afraid but there is at least one section of public land I guess I'll say it and if you email me I'll email you the directions I've been sending people out there for a while and many have good luck and I'd be happy to do that it's public land you should know about it if you want to get out there and do this on your own but the blue agates were not formed in this valley they're found in this valley they were not formed in this valley and so this is the geology session and I want to talk about where the blue agates formed if not in this valley why they formed what we know about how they formed and of course there's a few questions many questions we don't have answers to yet and you'll notice there's something here north of our valley that's actually the source of the blue agate so we're going to get into that pretty much right now but before we get into the academic discussion and we talked about Washington 49 million years ago that's a date that's important to us tonight let's see if I can take you with me without turning off the live stream that would be sad I also want to keep you landscape because I've had problems with that goodbye alright now you're looking out the back of my phone it's a beautiful evening you can see we've got some clouds so I'm not fighting the Sun mercifully and I got all sorts of stuff I want to show you but I will start especially for UK or Australia or God knows where and you have never seen a blue agate before so here are some blue agates - just to do a little show-and-tell so here's a nice piece mostly almost all of these are gifts it's a perk of teaching here and being a public person and people are so generous that they want to pass along some of their great stuff so these are what Ellensburg blue and agates look like of course something like this should I come in close and am I gonna lose the fire I'm gonna lose the focus let's what if I come in slowly whoa what's going on I could do better focus last night there we go so this has been in a rock tumbler of course can you still hear me by the way are we still doing okay please leave a comment if you can hear me oh oh no comments oh great okay okay thank you thank you there's a little delay there so these have been a rock in a rock tumbler I'm not sure what the foot what's going on with the focus here tonight thank you thank you thank you and notice that we've got some varieties here here's a blue agate that then has kana 'some I'm really gonna try to come close here actually we need the bright Sun right now I wish it wasn't overcast right now but still okay you get the idea there's different shades of blue this is my wife's ring she must have had a handsome person give this to her if I ever find out who that was I'll chase them down just kidding some earrings okay so this is not just collecting blue stones it's actually taking them to a jeweler and getting some work done some jewelry or some faceted whatever stuff that I don't know very much about Oh Maria yes yes yes yes okay good so we're gonna get to this stuff in a second well I've got you here I know let's let's go back so you're back you're still in the landscape it's time to do some geology some teaching hope you're up for it we're gonna go back to the blues if you're only here for the blues and nothing else we're gonna do some chalkboard stuff all right that's my thing I don't have the collecting gene I know most people do I don't have it when people here they don't have just gobs and gobs of all these things in my you know my bedroom or whatever there's plenty we I've got plenty of the at the geology building I'm not a collector okay let's get into this let's try to answer some basic questions what's this about this is where the blue egg gets formed why is it just right here and why doesn't it continue over to Wenatchee the answer is there's younger stuff that buried this important layer why not let's go for it this is the Tiana way basalt it's a geologic formation called the Tianna wave basalt let's get into it we need to know about the tiene way basalt cartoon time okay so let's do this pretty quickly this is a cross-section going from the north to the south this is a side view and if you were with us last night we took a little hike and looked at Mount Stewart which is north of Ellensburg Ellensburg is here my backyard is right here okay so we're looking to the north and if we get over to Mount Stewart we've gone too far but there's very important layer called the Tianna way basalt that erupted it's a lava flow basalt that he up did 49 million years ago and it erupted right here in other words the lava came to the surface right here in Central Washington and I have to do something with this whiteboard to make sense of this you see what I've done now the land what used to be flat and these are cracks where the lava came up through we call them Feder dikes we were talking about those last night with some younger lavas let's not get mixed up that's not this is 49 million years ago way older than our River story last night okay you with me we've got Mount Stewart and other things that have happened already we don't care we've got these cracks magically opening up in Central Washington and this Hawaiian like lava coming up and flooding the surface with lava and look very carefully in the upper part of that Tiano a basalt the cap rock the rock that actually flooded central Washington 49 million years ago there's blue agates forming in those openings now that sounds nice and simple we're not exactly sure that the blue agates are 49 million years old but we are sure many of the vesicles or vugs or open places in the Tiano and basalt have agate material and some of those nuggets are a beautiful blue color so there's question marks already what's so special about this lava to have the blue agates why don't the blue agates form in all lavas why are they only forming in the Tiano a basalt difficult to answer that but our story is this now more recently these layers from this original horizontal position and vertical position are now to the way they are today so we have this ridge north of Ellensburg some of you know this as red top some of the you know this is the first Creek area where Tiano a ridge is there's other places as well parts of east and ridge or the tiene wave the saw but the point is if we can get to that Ridge with Tianna way basalt we can get to where the blue agates actually formed and they formed in the holes so let's talk just quickly let's talk just quickly about holes and agates in general agates in general are cavity fillings if you're a kid I just said cavity and you think teeth but let's not get into that I shouldn't have said cavity agates fill holes in rock underground where we have hot fluids so this looks like a river rock but it's been cut by a saw and it's actually an agate this looks like a river rock but it's been cut by a rock saw and it's actually an agate this looks like a river rock but it's been cut by a rock saw and it's an agate so some of these round stones like we had last night if you carefully break them open they're actually not river rocks they're holes that got filled with love I'm getting to this I promise so here's a close-up of the actual Tiano a basalt boy we got dark clouds now so I don't know how the lighting is here I probably should have brought in some other lighting whatever so I would call this an ugly Rock I don't know about you it's 49 million years old it's the tno a basalt but if we look very carefully there are a couple places where the cavities were the holes where the gas bubbles have been filled with agate one there one there let's find another basalt lava that has gas bubbles or vesicles but we don't have any agate inside so this is a different lava not the Tianna way and you can see that lots of lava has open spots like this and this one's a dud there's no agates in it to look I can get pretty close here the focus I think looks pretty good and we're not seeing anything the point is if we're gonna fall you know what I can do it back to the Tiano a basalt this one I personally collected a couple years ago with Wes angstrom we'll talk about him in a second and you can see some of the holes got filled pretty good there know why the focus isn't quite as sharp as it was last night whatever I'm getting greedy now okay so if you find agates let's do this so this is an agate and just looks like a rock that's been cut open and we can see all these layers inside but it's an agate well what I'm trying to say is that an agate of this size and shape is really originally a hole of that size in shape we fill the hole with court and then the surrounding rock crumbles away and were left with the hole so one more time if you're a kid what's an agate to make an egg you need to make holes first then you need to fill the holes with quartz then you got to be patient you got to wait millions of years for all the lava rock to crumble away and all those little things that were filled are free from jail and allowed to kind of be out and on their own okay hope that worked our next step in this discussion why why did these cracks form why did this lava come up what happened 49 million years ago to do this I mean we only have one tno a basalt and it's the one that has all the blue agates the other vesicles that are filled with the agates why did this happen why did these cracks form okay I love plate tectonics I want to use the chalkboard I'm gonna do it 56 million years ago not 49 56 million years ago there was a huge island off shore what's the name of it correct so let's see yeah that's a story for another day that's a story for next week actually okay so so let's see a huge island that formed made out of basalt 56 million years old 56 million years ago it's offshore but by 51 million years ago so let's see is approaching the edge of Washington and Oregon because the ocean floor was actually moving like a conveyor belt to the Northeast and notice this map am i that bad of a drawer don't answer that actually the answer is yes but Seattle and Portland are here 49 million years ago and there is no sorry Seattle and Portland are here before 51 million years ago and there is no Olympic Peninsula and the Coast Range of Oregon yet but are you ahead of me when we take Silesia and then finally have it kiss the edge of North America we're going to add a bunch of land and the addition of Silesia is going to make up the bedrock of much of the Olympic Peninsula and the coast range the addition or accretion of Silesia happened 51 to 49 million years ago and during that time we've got Silesia from out here to actually smashed on to the leading edge of North America basically much of the bedrock WestEd Cascades is Silesia now you're like well what does that got to do with our story what does Salette SIA have to do with this I mean this is basalt but this is not Silesia so let's see is is west of i-5 what's the answer do you know let me give you a more specific question how are these cracks forming related to Silesia the answer is from the impact of Silesia which was a major event thousands I'm not exaggerating thousands of cracks formed not only in Central Washington but I now realize formed also in Idaho and Montana in the entire Pacific Northwest these cracks formed and each crack these are not faults they're cracks they're fissures and each crack is where the crust got opened up each crack is like a pry bar open piece of crust and then the lava comes up the cracks so I'm explaining why these cracks formed north of Ellensburg they formed as a result of pushing and crashing in slow motion celesia onto the edge now you might be a smart person and say well why would the cracks be oriented like this that doesn't make any sense didn't you really just say that each of these cracks and you see that those are arrows going away from each other does that work if we have a major I'm going to draw big arrows now if we have getting in the way of myself if so let's see it adding is causing squeezing from the North East and the Southwest which is what I'm telling you why would you have cracks open up in this orientation quick story I used to be a teenager I don't look like it now but I used to be a teenager okay my job was to work in a self-service gas station this is 1979 I'm sitting in a little air-conditioned booth and there's all these self-service pump 1979 there's no credit cards you're an old dude an old lady and you're trying to get to ten on the nose and you know you're your fingers aren't what they used to be so suddenly it's 10:13 and you got to walk up to me and pay cash the old men that I remember from Fort Atkinson Wisconsin in 1979 had these these are coin purses and it's the best analogy I have to explain why these cracks formed in the orientation that they did how does a coin purse work I got coins in my coin purse to open the coin purse I have to squeeze I have to squeeze north east south west and I'm going to open the other two directions money from heaven pennies from heaven okay this is kind of like a health class now sorry entertaining myself though okay so we got it I hope all right there is a connection between these dykes we call them health clip between these cracks opening up and a regional tectonic story but you're a blue agate lover a blue agate hunter a blue agate jeweler and you say get back to the agates I don't want to talk anymore about this okay that's fine good so that's the end of the story I have to say here however I have to get a full marker I haven't answered yet have I how is it possible to get the loose bloom Easter eggs that the kids can go pick up off the ground in our Valley in other words how did they get moved from where the blue agates formed to where the blue agates are now I think I'm going to get wet quick last night last night I tried to point out than the haze we wouldn't be able to see it tonight the green canyon knotch which is a wind gap where our old river used to flow it's a place where a river used to flow from up by Liberty Washington where the gold is and the blue agates are into the valley when the blue when the Green River Canyon had a river flowing through it it was the river that was carrying broken pieces of tyann away basalt and the hard job rakers that filled in the holes oh god can we do too okay you got the map view and the cross-section view can you picture a river coming away from the ridge and flowing down into the valley and then on the map that river is flowing through the green canyon notch and this is a big alluvial fan where River rocks have been coming through that Green Canyon not for a long time most of the rocks worthless but some of the rocks valuable because it's the blue agate material coming away from the ridge okay it's already 25 after 6 and I'm not done hang with me I just gave you the old story the story that exists on YouTube there's an Ellensburg blue agate lecture that I gave in 2013 and for the most part it holds up but I've met some people in the last couple of years that have really been helpful to me and their basic message to me is nice job on the lecture I don't think you're right or they did they put it nicer than that but they basically said I think there's more to the story than what you're saying and I'm like oh I'm always up for learning new things I'm not embarrassed I always like getting closer and closer to what actually happened how can you help me learn that it's more than just the T noe basalts and the filling of the material yep you're coming with me 338 people good lord so I met gentleman by the name of Carl Carlson and Carlson is retirement age now but he's still working and his father is in his late 80s or early 90s and we have a person who has the best blue agates in the state the best blue agates really in the whole Pacific Northwest and Carl has not only been nice to come over to Ellensburg and visit with me but he said I want you to be able to teach as completely as you can about the blue agates and I want to give you some of my best samples basically Carl said my best blue agates are not coming from the vesicles in the Tian way basalt instead Carl said my best Ellensburg blue agates are coming from veins in rhyolite not vesicles in basalt both can be true but from Carl's best claims Carl Carlson Tacoma I want to show you what he has given me to use as teaching samples that I get a lot of people coming into my office is this a blue agate is this a blue I get he said look let me give you some really great blue agate so you can just show them you don't have to say a word you can just show them the stuff so Carl started giving me stuff like this so here's the rock in raw form and I want you to notice a couple of things do you see that his blue agate is being found in a vein instead of I don't know instead of those holes this is let me let me just keep going so the country rock or in other words the rock that is hosting the blue agates that Carl has is not basalt but this tan stuff is rhyolite which is a much different kind of a lava now the Tiana way basalt and the tiene way rhyolite doesn't even show up on a map like this it doesn't even show up on a map like this instead this rhyolite is a mystery to me I don't know the specific age of the rhyolite we've got some new dates on some riot lights in the area that's in the neighborhood of 44 million years there's some other rhyolite ages in the Tiano a area that are 24 I'm shouting now because I'm excited 24 million years I don't understand why that rhyolite is their number one and number two why a bunch of blue agate is being formed in the rhyolite and not the basalt so in addition much of the rhyolite here's some raw piece that hasn't been cut or polished much of the the rhyolite is breccie ated it's it's broken pieces where was that good I had a couple good samples showing that I guess this so it looks like at least some of the Blues maybe the best blues are found in places where we have bretch where we have rhyolite that's been broken into pieces and you can get a breccia I thought it had a better piece I don't have time to look for it one way you can make breccie ation like this angular pieces is to shatter the rock during earthquake faulting but and I don't know as much about this but apparently you can also get breccia from hot fluids cracking the rock and then sealing it with these hot fluids and then the system is still hot it still has volatile and so you crack again and then you fill the cracks again but look at these these are veins these aren't those those jaw breakers that we were looking at before and so that's the main thing that Carl has been helping me realize is that the blue agates are coming from this there we go there's some brecci ated material so this is a totally different story than what we said with the basalt isn't it now is it possible that the blue agate up in red top and the blue agate in this what's he an away rhyolite is both high-quality blue it's possible maybe probable but there's more to the story than just filling a holes in the basalt okay Wes angstrom that I mentioned let me I'm going to go back to oh here so before we go back to my pretty face there's also some agate material where you actually have this banding going on there's muffler boy can you hear that and the question is if the agate is found in place at an angle like this does that mean that the agate formed originally horizontally like this and then we can actually measure how many degrees away from horizontal the mountain ridge tilted I don't know enough about agates to know if that is really true that we can actually get an original horizontal before we start rotating be who wants to learn more about Blue Angus okay we're coming back up you're gonna look back at me here for a second sorry about that and I want to finish it's my struggling face sorry you had to see that I want to finish I want to finish with a couple more things so Wes angstrom is a retired Boeing engineer he's one of many folks that I have learned to communicate with and has lots of good interest and time to work on things so Carl's been tapes are e Wes has been taking some of Carl samples that I just showed you and he's been doing really high-quality photography of the details and I don't know what I'm looking at Wes is talking about kind of a hoarfrost kind of a look to some of the blue now we're in the veins we're in Carl's veins now instead of I wash my hands every 30 minutes Jim really interesting at a tiny tiny scale oh this is a photo for scale and then taking some photos so we're to the last part of my presentation where there's some questions that are still being worked on and that's exciting and here's another one to show you a scale and then we have really interesting photography I don't know what magnification sorry we have these on display in our geology building okay I got one last thing I'm gonna read you an email so angela Halfpenny works on the third floor of our building and we have been blessed with a brand new building with brand new equipment and the state tax payers funded that building and we're putting that instrumentation to great use and Angela what's her title Murdoch research laboratory manager she knows how to operate all these pieces of equipment I barely know how to get in the lab and what's inside but Angela saw that I was doing this and she has been working in other words Carl Carlson from Tacoma West angstrom a few other blue agate collectors have been bringing their samples to Angela and she's been doing a bunch of detailed chemistry on the Blues and she has a research interest kind of using this relationship that I'm kind of the middleman between all these folks so I'm going to read this to you Angela sent this to me last night hey Nick what I've learned from measuring a variety of blue quartz tones from different locations is that the trace element signature is different based on where the quartz has grown so Holly blue quartz from Oregon has a different chemical signature to Ellensburg blue quartz tones Ellensburg blue stones are formed in veins that cross cut the tian away basalt so that's Carl's story Ellensburg blues show a varied trace element chemical signature which I believe is to do with the distance of mineralization of the quartz away from the source of the fluid at depth I believed was one fluid source which became over-pressurized and therefore managed to create joints / veins or reactivate pre-existing structures that the Ellensburg blue grew in once the fluid had been depleted from the reservoir it did not fill up again and the Ellensburg blue veins were a single pulse of fluid event now Angela's only lived here a few years she these are kind of early observations and potential ideas that she's kind of rolling around and she has experience working with agates from around the world she has international experience but these are all early ideas I've got one more paragraph for you I think the bread cheated rhyolites are from where the fluid reservoir was and the breccia is due to the energy involved when the fluid initially bursts out of the reservoir but have no field evidence to back this up I need to speak with you and Andrew more about this this is more based off of samples that I've seen that's my simple summary hope it makes sense and is helpful for your live stream so that's kind of what we are currently I personally want to learn what I can about past work that's been done on the right where that rhyolite it is up there I possibly get some folks to work on the detailed ages and chemistry of the rhyolite since that may be a more of a smoking gun to the best blue quality than the basalt and the final comment before we open it to your questions is Carl Carlson says I'm not so sure that Green Canyon notch and the river story is the main story I think my breccie ated rhyolite is right there south of the green canyon knotch so instead of traveling these blue agates from Liberty down through the notch and then spilling them out he thinks possibly it's a much more local brecciated rhyolite story where you don't transport things very much at all okay that was a little longer than the past lectures our live streams but I had a a lot I haven't wanted to show you if you're still a kid and you want to be with this here's a quartz crystal it's got nothing to do with tonight it's not blue is it it's made out of quartz just like the Ellensburg blue agates but even a quartz crystal like this had to form in a big cavity or a big room underground so that's the only connection with tonight we don't have any blue quartz crystals here in Ellensburg they're all these smaller things okay now since there's so many questions about chemistry and physics of the Blues I'm gonna be a little bit less helpful than past live streams sounds like a disclaimer I guess it was but I want to go ahead and try to answer as many of your questions as possible and I'm gonna scroll back a little bit until I start seeing some upper case which indicates the questions don't touch your fate Yeah right I've been well I smell bar soap I'm gonna wash my hands again right after I get thrown this freaking live stream I haven't talked to a single person except my wife you don't understand actually you do understand we're all doing the same thing don't say me though why is it blue well there was a guy named Paul Hosken here from New Zealand who was in the department just a few years in his work before he left was more of a physics question than a chemistry question he thought the blue was from why the sky is blue and he found at very tiny levels these little spheres that would refract reflect and refract light to create the blue look so his approach was not a chemical and purity story but a physics question and sometimes you do find something that you swear is blue out in the field and you get it home and you wash it up and maybe even cut it in a sauce it's great it didn't hold its color so Angela's angle of course is more of a trace chemistry trace element story so I'm not sure how to weigh those those different things what mineral is the agate Mayo same question basically what's your email I'm gonna get him Nick at geology dot CWU edu I have a website called Nick center.com I like steak and potatoes and vanilla pudding that's appropriate super vanilla person hot fluid flowing through cracks depositing layers of agate material like opals kind of yeah I know so little about agate formation some swearing be she's leaving I swear some people say it has to be cold fluids not hot fluids we're going to talk about the Liberty Gold next week and the gold is tied to the tea anyway basalt as well and so it seems like we need hot fluids I don't know how you can get away from that but I guess you can again I'm having scrolling problems like I did last night fourteen-year-old Moriah how do you know a river rock from an agate what makes the quartz blue so the blue is probably from chemistry inside of the quartz like impurities and also a little bit of how the light passes through the quartz Mariah and how do I know a river rock from an agate that's why we have these hammers we break them open sometimes it doesn't look like anything and then you look inside and it's blue or if you're out on that field that I'm talking about you're literally picking something up that doesn't look dark it looks light and sometimes you just turn it over and it looks blue it's like turning over a little a little baby a little baby turtle little baby turtle I'm really frustrated with my scrolling I don't know why what's the biggest blue agate ever found Evelyn's age 7 I don't know Evelyn I have seen rocks the size of my head that's a big head look at the size of my head I've seen blue-ish agates that big but I'm not sure they really are a quality blue color like like your need I think Carl Carlson's approach is wanting a certain test a certain chemical test to help his business and be you know scientifically proving that certain things are blue agates what's the difference between obsidian and agates well obsidian is a lava rock so there's a lot of different kinds of elements and and minerals inside of an obsidian it's glass but it's got a complex chemistry these agates tonight it's just quartz there's just silicon and oxygen and that's it and there's nothing else inside there's other differences as well what is the hot fluid water you can think of it as water but it's mineral rich fluids and I wish I could tell you more Aspen age 11 how do you tell for sure if the agate you find is in Ellensburg blue agate that's a good question the deeper the blue color the more likely it's a blue agate so you can see there's some different shades of blue with this guy and that's why Carl was so helpful to me he said I want to give you these blue agates mainly so that you can see the quality of the blue and you can just show people that it's the depth of blue that we need to be sure but there is no kind of test but maybe Angela will come up with one but there is no test that we have right now to say you have a blue agate it's more of a Carl has got a couple other tricks but it's not my thing did you choose the blue shirt for the blue agate discussion well yes I did I have a stone I would like tested can you provide Miss halfpennies email Casey I'll have to check with her about that I don't think she said I know she's not set up to just receive samples through the mail and and all of our buildings on campus are closed to the public for a while hopefully not too much longer how common are agates in the northwest outside of Ellensburg there are plenty of other agate locations I'm not a good guy to ask however there are rock clubs all across the Pacific Northwest and when I gave that Ellensburg blue agate lecture I was invited by all these rock clubs to give that talk to these Kennewick and Wenatchee and Ellensburg and Seattle and Tacoma and they all have their favorite places to go so I'll bet you it's pretty easy if you get online and start searching for agate localities you'll find some good spots those rock clubs are are very open clubs to whoever wants to join including children to me that there's no real difference between a geode and a thunder egg I suppose there is some specific difference but not to my point of view I'm going to scroll back now because I'm still not sure our egg it's related to K so so we're getting hung up on words again and if you're a veteran of my stuff I feel like the words get in the way in this case they probably don't but I'm I'm I'm not as knowledgeable with this specific topic than I that I could be so why do you do a live stream than if you don't know exactly what's going on how does some part look smooth and some part looks shattered well if we go back if you mean so if you mean shattered so here's you know I would you even pick this up if you saw this I mean it's been cut by a rock saw right here but it takes some experience almost like a fisherman or somebody else who just kind of has a knack and has an eye so you know you cut that open and you see this sort of thing so to me that looks shattered let me get another shattered one for you I really like this one to me this is a small one but to me it's the best as far as showing the the rhyolite nature and the real angular part of this so I've already forgotten the question I'm sorry but many of these are smooth because they've been in a rock tumbler and they have been smoothed over by a machine how do rhyolite and basalt differ ah I can actually answer that one let me put my laptop down so there's different kinds of lava flows all around the world and these are the two lavas we've been talking about tonight they could not be more different so can you decide which one is basalt and which one is rhyolite they're both lava they both are lava magma that erupt out of a volcano but this one is basalt the dark one because it's made out of dark minerals and if you joined us late the old story I told about how blue agates form is saying go to the T Noa basalt which has low amounts of silica in it which is very fluid when it flows and comes out of a volcano and you'll if you go to Hawaii or Iceland or the Galapagos Islands you'll see eruptions like this but this is the newest then kind of revised or the work-in-progress story and this is a part of the TN away rhyolite look at how light-colored it is look at how different it looks than our basalt and this has been heavily altered so there's rhyolite over by Wenatchee where there's a lot of gold deposits so the gold is kind of loosely tied to these blue agates and I didn't mention it back then but I'll mention it now if you were back with us for the first livestream lecture that I did last Tuesday seems like three years ago was this last less than a week ago I was over there with the spotty reception and I talked about the chalice Magma's where between 60 and 40 million years ago between 60 and 40 million years ago in the Tiano a formation fits into this there's an incredible grab bag of different kinds of Magma's basalt andesite rhyolite gabbro diorite granite de site rio de site total light all these different kinds of igneous rocks that are all part of this Chellis magma popping up all across from British Columbia all the way to the Dakotas and so the Tiano a is part of that kind of hard to understand TN away story and therefore we can get the runny and fluid estuvo Magma's basalt and the stiffest and stickiest and toothpaste deist lavas in on planet earth called rhyolite we can have them erupting in the same area remember I just said TN away basalt in T an away rhyolite somehow are from the same system so there's work to be done on that I appreciate all the questions where is the wind gap in relation to red top so red so red top is a public place that many people drive to so you pack a picnic lunch you get on some Forest Service roads you drive right to the top of red top there's a fire lookout to this up there and it's a war zone up there man people people been wailing on that piano a basalt for a long long time jackhammers the whole thing and they've been finding a lot of agates typically not the deep blue agates but they're finding a lot of agates and it's a good old-fashioned fun time the Green River Canyon which is that windgap where the river used to flow is here so I'd put red top right over here Eastern Ridge red top Green Canyon knotch and then we're kind of approaching table mountain but Table Mountain is out of those lava got time for just a few more we're not taking a walk tonight sorry are there other colors of agate present in the same deposit not colored these are all great and thank you for the question they're not all so we go from kind of blue which is the target down to a pale blue down to a gray down to kind of a whitish and that's it there's no Pink's or greens or other things in this deposit how old is the rhyolite versus the Tiana Webb the salt yeah I'm working on that I think some of that has been mapped out I haven't even been to it a rhyolite outcrop up in that area I've seen it on a few geologic maps but I haven't even taken to time this spring I was teaching geology through I was teaching geology 351 where we'd go out every Thursday afternoon and the plan was to take my 20 advanced geology majors up into the TN away area and follow through on that but now it's an online class how are we going to do a field class online there are more are more challenges going on than in my little conundrum I'm scrolling back with just a few final questions is this related to the Liberty gold or related at all it has to be the Ellensburg blue agates have to be related somehow to the Liberty Gold but when we get to the Liberty Gold discussion I'll give you a schedule here in just a second before we quit it's difficult to date the agate at the agate ization itself it's difficult to date the gold itself you can get some dates on the country rock the TN way basalt that's ya know rhyolite but to get the age of mineralization I don't know much about and I'm not sure it's a common approach and if it is I need to learn what has been done with these things but from my point of view and it's an it's a question I've just started thinking about seriously Wenatchee and Liberty are as the crow flies less than 20 miles away from each other and they both have rhyolite they both have gold and the blue agates are more over here than over there but there has to be a common story there and I'm I'm real motivated in the next few years to do what I can to kind of flesh that out really appreciate you being with us we still have more than 300 I'm getting texts now from marine rust I can't even see my thank you marine I'm gonna look for two more questions maybe that we have it I'm going to scroll all the way back hot fluid earth did that I really apologize if I haven't found your back to people yeah alright carbon dating doesn't work it does not carbon dating is a way to get ages on things that are organic and and so usually dates that we use the dates that we get from carbon dating are just a few thousand years old and we know that we're back in the window of tens of millions of years for sure for the agate for the gold for the tea anyway basalt the rhyolite and everything else we do have age dating techniques to get ages for the lavas but I'm saying the age of the minerals is different probably different that's a fundamental question actually let's finish with that let's finish with that we'll finish what we started we'll even do a little sneak peak of the Liberty gold thing next week so 49 million years ago we have a good date for the basalt and we have a good date for when this was orange liquidy lava coming up through the cracks now okay that's fine are we sure that the gold which we'll learn next week is found right next to these feeder dikes we sure the gold formed at the same time that the lava was hot and are we sure that the blue agates are filling the holes right when the system is working for 49 million years ago or is it possible that everything cools off the love is hardened to basalt the cracks are hardened into basalt feeder dikes and is it possible that sometime later how long you want to wait five million years ten million years we're not up to 39 million years ago 25 million years ago is it possible that it's many millions of years after the Tiano a basalt that we heat the system up again and we bring all these hot fluids into this picture and that's when we start painting these holes shut with blue quartz and that's when we bring the wire gold in that we'll talk about next week I've done a fair amount of reading done a fair amount of discussing with geologists about this area of course when you get into mining everybody's hush-hush and it's proprietary information and we don't want to let the cat out of the bag but I've learned enough to know that we don't really know the age of that mineralization it would be fun to have somebody figure that out and from my point of view plug it back into something like this that's my favorite stuff is to tell stories from the olden times before I lose you tonight let me show you the schedule for next week I feel like I want to just keep going with these you know things are not changing globally they are but we're not heading in the right direction and so it looks like we're at this for a while and I want to just keep going with these so the schedule I think is five of these a week five of these a week so we did Tuesday Wednesday Thursday last week then we took Friday off then we want Saturday and tonight is Sunday we're taking Monday off and if you want to come back next week or can of course you can watch these after the fact this is the plan for next Tuesday Wednesday Thursday we'll stick with our time 6 p.m. Pacific time I've had plenty of requests to change the time I'm sorry this works best for me and I think for many if you're going to Facebook to try to find these it's not Facebook live you need to get to be live you have to go to my YouTube channel and probably best to subscribe it's free and that means you can get notified when these are happening or if you just want to remember to come at six o'clock and go to YouTube channel I don't know how you're finding these but that's the best way to do it is to subscribe to my youtube channel and then get a notification to remind you that I've gone live and we're ready to go you can get notified by a little bell on your phone or an email or both or whatever but I want to revisit the German truck the cake still got some left in the kitchen and I want to ask about why those flood basalts actually happened we've got a decent story there then I want to talk about petrified wood a huge petrified forest actually multiple petrified forests in Central Washington not Arizona Central Washington and then we will Thursday of this week come back to the tea anyway basalt I probably draw that picture again of our feeder dike and share with you what I know about the Liberty Gold toast to you here's to you and your health here's to the health of your parents and your brothers and sisters and your children and your grandparents and your neighbors and your friends and everybody on planet Earth thanks for joining us we'll see you tomorrow night no we won't we'll see you Tuesday night flood basalts exclamation point goodnight I love you

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 17,121

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Id: dmPtgFsYvpA

Length: 74min 56sec (4496 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020