A Beginners Guide to Agate Identification

well hello everybody and welcome back it is a cold and snowy day in minnesota today so since we can't go raw counting i thought it would be kind of fun to go through some of the agates that i have found in the 2020 season this last year and really only since this summer i found a bunch of different agates and one thing that i have learned a lot better now is how to identify those agates there are a few tools that i like to use to identify agates including my trusty and favorite book the rocks and minerals of minnesota so since i am from minnesota this book is awesome and i love it and it really helps me identify almost all of the rocks that i have um so this is definitely one of my favorite tools for helping me identify against the other thing that we're going to be using today is a flashlight and we are going to be using a knife as well to help us identify um the hardness of our rocks so there are specific hardnesses that egg it's have to be and if they are not that hard they're either a mixed with something else some other type of mineral or b um not an egg at all so we're going to be using those three things today to help us identify the agates so one thing when i first started rock hounding is i found that there are so many different kinds of agates and i was really overwhelmed at first with trying to identify all of the different kinds so my goal of this video today is to help you identify and make it a little bit easier for you to identify the different agates that you find so with that being said we have some egg it's here i'm going to take this lid off but if you can see this is kind of my collection here of different agates now these top rows are jaspers so we have like yellow jasper red jasper um then i i did start to kind of categorize like the oodalytic jaspers the maryellen jaspers things like that and then some different types of calcium as well down here in these two sections are all of my different agates and i'm actually going to go through these two um and show you which ones i thought originally were agates why they tricked me and how to prevent you from making that same mistake so let's get started okay so we have our eggets here our book our knife and our flashlight so one thing that's really important when you're identifying agates is to get yourself a handy dandy flashlight this will help to see the translucency of the agate and translucency has to do with if you're able to see light through the rock if you're able to see the light through the rock it is called translucency you might also hear words like transparent um transparent is actually when you can clearly see through it like a piece of glass so translucency is when you can see light through it like you can see here we're also going to need a knife so this is the knife that i um use when i go rock pounding it's kind of cool it actually has like a little piece of flint in it too but um it's kind of a beefy beefy guy here you don't need to find one quite so big um this is just the one that i use but what you're doing with the knife is you're going to be checking for the hardness of the mineral so when you're checking for hardness of a mineral you're going to want to take the knife and you're going to scratch the surface of the rock you're going to kind of continue scratching to see if you are able to leave a mark on the rock so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take our rock here and i'm going to try to scratch it so i like to set it down and really give it a good and honest scratch so as you can see i am really scratching up the surface here and no matter how hard i try i am unable to scratch this rock now sometimes with different rocks and material you may end up seeing like a little bit of a scratch on your rock however if you're able to rub that scratch off and when you feel if there's no mark that you left um it truly did not scratch through the rock but just kind of scratched along the surface so in order for it to leave a scratch it really needs to to mark it where you can feel it with your finger so now let's talk a little bit about types of agates so this book right here i really highly recommend for any new or old raw counts um because it is so so helpful um it goes through all the different types of rocks in your state so maya of course is the state of minnesota and what i really like about it is is it talks about all the different types of agates i mean there are so many so many different types of agates which we are going to be talking about today and how to identify all the different types of eggs another trick that's really important um that can be really helpful to you when you're identifying agates is using some water so um in order to see the banding on a lot of agates it sometimes helps for you to get them a little bit wet so as you can see there is some nice banding here on this agate banding is going to be the most important part in identifying an egg it if it has bands it's most likely an agate now i just added a little bit of water but as you can see it really helps to show and highlight the bands of the agate and you can really start to see see if i can get a good angle there we go you can really start to see how many bands are on this rock also i think it just makes it look prettier too so um that's really helpful as well like i was saying one of the most important parts of identifying an egg is if it has bands so as you can see this one is a beautifully banded egget and you can tell that this is an egg it right away because it has those beautiful bands so if i take my light through it you can also see that it is translucent now there are other banded rocks of course which is what can be kind of tricky if you're just solely looking for the bands on a rock for example here i have a little piece of we'll say banded jasper you can see a band running through it right here now to the untrained eye i might go oh is this an agate ah that's kind of a lot of water and i would say no it is not it is jasper the reason i know this is just because i have identified so many different types of jasper before but there are some different methods that you can use to help you go oh this is a piece of jasper this is not an agate the knife test won't help you really with this one because jasper and agate are similar hardness so this jasper won't be able to be scratched by a knife just like our agates one thing that can help you identify the difference between a jasper and an agate is using your flashlight test jasper you are unable to see light through so if i put the flashlight anywhere on this rock you cannot see light through it at all jasper is another type of microcrystalline quartz just like egg it is and that's really their only difference is egget you are able to see light through it so it's got that translucency and it also has banding jasper you are not able to see light through it and even though sometimes it may seem like it has banding um it can just be a type of banded jasper so hopefully that's helpful some other types of rocks that people often get confused egg it with is chalcedony so this is a nice piece of honeycomb calcium now the reason that this is sometimes confused with agate is because it is as you can see very translucent here you can really see that light through it now the reason that this is not an agate you think you can guess it is because it doesn't have banding so if i look all around this piece of kalcedni i will find no banding now let's say i do end up finding some banding um that would indicate then that it is actually an agate so kelsetni and agates are super super close to being the same thing they're both microcrystalline quartzes they both have translucency the only difference that makes this a chalcedony is that it does not have banding so um the differences are really small so when you're first starting out um it can be really difficult to kind of remember those differences um but just know that agates always always always have banding always if they don't have banding but they are translucent it's most likely called sydney or carnelian now another thing to note is that not all agates are translucent so this is an agate now the reason that this is an egg agate and say not a piece of jasper is because you can see those beautiful bands now what make what might make you think that this could be a jasper is because you cannot see any light through this agate now this is called a paint egg it technically it's a fortification paint agate because all of the bands you can see connect um so the reason that this is called a fortification egg it is because all of those bands connect unlike for example one like this where you are just seeing um the bands but you are not seeing where they connect so again this is called a paint agate because you're not able to see the light through it and a fortification agate because you can see all of the bands connecting um with themselves here so technically it has two different labels um and you actually may see different agates labeled in different ways kind of depending on the raw count and things like this do have so many different names because there are so many different ways to classify agates just like there are so many different ways to classify other rocks so i'll show you some more examples of a paint agate here is another version of a paint agate now this one looks very very similar to yellow jasper so if i pulled out a piece here of yellow jasper we can see that the coloring in these are almost the exact same so i kind of have trouble with ones like this as well this could be a beautifully banded piece of yellow jasper however typically you're not gonna find jasper with this type of incredible banding so this would be another type of fornification because all of the bands connect agate um and it would be an also and it would also be a paint egg it as well because you're not able to see here's another example of a different kind of here so along the outside you can see all of the agate banding you can see light through it so we know that this is yes an egg it this is all quartz along the inside here so this is oftentimes called a floater eggette because it has the outer banding of an egg it quartz and then kind of has the start it's really it's kind of almost not a floater eggette but because it has kind of the the egg it banding on the inside you can think of it as agate floating in a sea of quartz there are also things like this that you may look at and go um excuse me that is definitely not an egg it ariel this is something else but it's not an egg it now let me show you why it is naked i can again see light through it if i were to take my knife and try to mark it um there would be no mark because it is a hardness level of an agate and this kind of egg it is called a fractured membrane agate so you can see all along the outside here there is some fractured membranes and what that means here i'll show you a better example this one is a really good example of that so it's it's pieces of agate banding that have been kind of roughed up and fractured so that they're no longer connecting um but they're kind of just scattered throughout the rock now this one again you can see light through it and if you saw this rock like this you may not think this is an agate because the fractured membrane eggets are usually kind of looked over it's they're not as easy to identify because you don't see those beautiful bands like you do on a typical egg it um but they are actually considered agates one thing that's cool about this one is let's get a little water on here you can see the banding right there so looking at the top you're like i don't know maybe it's just a fractured membrane egg but boom look at that beautiful dark orange banding inside here um another thing that might be tricky is if the rock's sitting like this this one would honestly be even difficult for me to identify if i just saw it like this um because this does look like a typical rock however these little holes and pits can kind of help to give that away as well saying wait a minute i know that a lot of eggets have that potato skin type texture as you can see on this one this one's a really good example of that potato skin texture um but you can kind of see hints of it here that might indicate if you found an egg it or not and my thoughts are if you see a rock that you might even kind of think is an egg it take a look at it pick it up check it out you might be right here is another type of agate and this one is a really cool one as well so let's get this one a little bit wet so this one is actually a geode agate i found this one in a farmer's field which was really cool but on the outside you can see the outside kind of has those fractured membrane potato skin texture you can see a little bit of banding right there and then this one happened to be broken open and you can see look at how cool that is all the little crystals inside of this egg it and then along the outside you can see the banding so this is considered a geode agate so it's got that geode on the inside and the egg it banding on the outside another type of agate is called a tube agate so this one is and a lot of the times you kind of will find mixes like for example this one so not only is this one a fractured membrane egg it but it is also a beautifully banded egg it now this one is one of the most beautiful ones that i've ever found you would call this a fortification egg it because as you can see all of the bands connect okay kind of all around the rock which is so cool i absolutely love this one so this egg it is kind of cool because let's get it a little wet because this is not only a fortification agate where you can see all the bands and where they connect let's dry it off a little bit but it is a tube again which is really really cool so if you look right here you can see a couple of the different tubes now i kind of go back and forth on if this is an eye agate or a tube agate so there is a difference um between the two and i egg it the eye stays right on the surface um a tube agate actually goes all the way through the rock so if you look on this side there's really not any areas where you can see the tubing going through now it is kind of a thick agate so it could be that the tubes on this side um only go through you know maybe this far um but then it would still be considered a tube again and not an eye egg it because an eye egg it really only stays like very very surface level all right just got it a little bit more wet so this thing is just gorgeous i mean you can see all the little tubes running along the egg ooh that's a nice big one right there you can see there we go so you can see all those little tubes it is so cool um so this is a really good example of that so some other types of agates are peeler agates so this is a good example of a peeler agate so if you look on this side and you kind of have to look closely um right here you can see some banding just really really lightly right there you can also see some banding just slightly right around the edge here now the reason this is called a peeler egg it is when i turn it to this side you can see it almost looks like the rock has been peeled away like someone just took it and just kind of peeled it um now this is the only example that i actually have of a peeler agate i think while we're looking through the rocks maybe we'll come across more but what's so cool about this one is this kind of a mass here so originally i thought that this mass was yellow jasper but you can see that you can actually see the light trying to get a good angle the light right through it like that so jasper you cannot see light through this cannot be jasper so what i'm thinking that this is is more parts of either the chalcedony um or egg it and what gave it this texture is my best guess is another mineral formed along with it and since it's you can see it's a peeler agate here this guy must have had a little bit of a rough journey at some point in its life and it kind of broke away revealing some of the eroded bits that were maybe softer rock leaving this kind of really cool bumpy texture ugh i just think this thing is so cool so another really unique one um but yeah so if you see it kind of look like it's peeled away that's a good way to indicate that it is a peeler agate now this big one here um actually should not be in the agate category now you can see that you can see you can see that you can see light through it like show that looks cool but you can see that you can see light through it um but if i look on here i cannot see any banding so originally when i was first starting i thought oh my goodness i can see light through it this must be an egg it however it's not do you remember why because it doesn't have any bands so because it doesn't have bands this would be a piece of gilsed knee um still a really cool rock still think it looks really cool but not technically an agate here is a another agate this is another good one with a really really good example of that potato skin texture what's kind of cool about this one is you can see agate veining right here which kind of goes um along the rock now this is also a paint egg it because you're not able to see light through it what's kind of cool about this one is it's i mean it's fairly large and it's pretty unbroken so i kind of a feeling that if i were to cut this open or break this open it would look really really beautiful on the inside um which i may end up doing for a future video but you can see the hints that yes this is an egg it because you can see the the banding the kind of veins here along the outside you can see that potato skin texture and the coloring on it as well also agate veining is something that you might see in rocks too a lot of the times though you see it in the salt so here is an example of egg veining so you can see the veining of the egg it running throughout this host rock this side looks the best for sure um but yeah so this would be an example of a get veining now although this one is small this is actually my best example of gravitationally banded agate so you can see how the lines on this egghead are very uniform um they're all very straight and that is called gravitational banding so um they think they they really don't know like geologists don't really know how this rock was formed their best guess is that um the gravity is what kind of made the bands flat like this which is really really interesting so if you see um straight lines in an egg it like this that would be a gravitationally banded egg it and again you can see the light right through it looks pretty cool okay so now it's time for a test for you see if you can tell is this an agate or is this not an egg so looking at it um another thing that might help tell if it's an egg or not is it has concoital fracturing however doesn't necessarily mean that it is an agate okay so here's kind of a look at this one i'll show you with a flashlight okay so you can see the light through it however what is it missing banding it does not have any banding that i'm able to see so again this is another little piece of chalcedony not an agate still a cool rock still has that waxy luster concoidal fracturing but not an egg it because there's no banding okay let's try another one so this one this is another really cool guy now this one might be kind of hard to see you can see the waxy luster concoidal fracturing you can also see light through it you can see it right there and if you look close now this one um actually kind of stumped me at first because i was thinking oh this is another really nice piece of carnelian and the reason i say carnelian is because of this dark red color which would indicate that it's carnelian and not calcium very very close minerals they're very very similar the only difference between chalcedony like this and carnelian is the color so this deep red beautiful color would be carnelian but when i looked close you can see right there can you see it very very dark very very dark um banding so no this is not carnelian it's actually called a carnelian agate okay so here's another look at an egg it you can see the bands well just gorgeous you can see light through it you can see that potato skin texture telling you this is in fact an egg it um and i believe it is an occasionally banded egg it because all of the bands connect which is pretty cool other things that you might find are things like this these are agate chips so they're little bits and chips um of pieces that have broken off of bigger agates now one thing that i find kind of interesting is let's say i have this agate chip okay i pick it up and i see yep you can see light through it and i look and i can see so tiny it's hard to show you um hopefully you can see that that there is banding on this little tiny egg at chip so i know that this is an egg however if i were to pick up a chip like like this i can see the waxy luster i can see light through it okay but i don't see any banding i could call this a piece of cossetni but who knows it could have just been a piece of an egg like this that only chipped off just the part bloop that doesn't have the banding and so just because you can only see that little tiny bit you call it calcium but really maybe it did come from a big piece like this that has banding which would be an egg it so that's why this stuff can kind of be confusing and when i was first starting i was really confused by it because such tiny details like that really kind of change the whole name of a rock so the only way to really know for absolute sure that a piece like that would not be an agate and would truly only be kill sydney is like chemical testing um i don't know some sort of testing that they would have to do in a lab and obviously i do not have a lab nor a way to test it so a lot of the times raccoons really just kind of kind of guess to be honest and things that you see might change your opinion on the agates you might see the outside like this and go ooh that definitely looks like an egg it look at that potato skin texture ooh look it you can see light through it and then you flip it over and boom it's all quartz on the inside but maybe on the outside there's banding which would mean it's an egg it's still so it can be confusing but hopefully that's helpful and hopefully it helped you identify um some of the different ways that you can identify agates and don't worry about being perfect i have made many mistakes in identifying egg it's especially for starting out and when i learn more information with books and things like that you know why my my views change because i got smarter i learned more about the different rocks now i think the best thing about rock hunting and rock hounding is just having fun finding cool rocks that you think are interesting like this one is a little baby paint egg it that i wasn't sure was a paint i get originally but you can see the bands kind of right along the edge here but you can't see light through it so my biggest tip is to just go out there have fun find rocks that you think are interesting and don't worry too much about the labels and if you do hopefully this helped a little bit now i'll do a little rapid fire here to help you um with the agates as well so this one i can see light through it can coil fracturing however can't see banding not agate kind of a reddish color i'm gonna call it carnelian this you i don't think you can see light through it oh yep you can you can see light through it no bands that i can see i'm going to call this call suddenly here we can see light through it we can see bands we got ourselves an agate this one's really interesting i kind of like think of this one as like a clam shell um but you can see it's kind of hard to tell but you can't see light through it um but only in those parts there this outside is kind of dark this one i don't really know this is this is really hard i feel like it's some type of agate just because like the coloring and the inside but because i can't see any banding maybe we'll call it kelsed me and again i could be wrong oh maybe this is their banding no um but i'm gonna say undetermined maybe kill sydney let me know if you know in the comments here's another one you can see light through it however if i look at it i don't see oop maybe nope i don't see any banding another piece of calcium this one is actually an example of kind of like a whirl egg it you can see the banding kind of whirling throughout this rock so this would be a good example of a whirl egg it is teeny tiny guy now this one's really really pretty the coloring oh gorgeous but this is also another little egg baby i get here is a nice example of carnelian you can see through it it's got that beautiful orange color um no banding however but this kind of orangey red color tells me that this is carnelian well here is a good example of an eye agate so you can see we kind of got that egg it banding and then right here look at that gorgeous thing that is a beautiful eye agate so that's kind of the difference between the surface level you can see that it definitely does not go through the rock if that circle of agate went through the rock it would be called a tube egg it however it doesn't so it's called an eye egg it looks like a little eye looking at you i hope that helped you to identify some of the different rocks like i said books like this are really really going to be helpful for you um in identifying the different kinds of rocks thank you guys so much for watching this video i hope that it helped you to identify the different kinds of agates that there are different things that may trick you and different ways for you to identify if you really did find an agate or maybe one of their imposters hopefully it also helped you with identifying the different classes of agates and and that sort of thing as well if you guys liked this video i'd love it if you gave it a big old thumbs up and if you're new here i'd love if you subscribe to this channel i love making content like this and it's definitely one of my passions um i'm getting really close to a thousand subscribers which is like mind blowing to me i don't i don't even know like how that happened that's so many people and i really appreciate all of your guys's support and i'm loving that you are loving these videos because i absolutely love making them so thank you so much for your support i've been really enjoying this and i hope that you have too i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Agate Ariel

Views: 67,040

Keywords: Agates, Agate, Agate identification, How to identify agates, Is it an agate, What is an agate, Where do you find agates, Paint agate, Eye agate, Tube agate, Agate veining, Banded agate, Agate geode, Jasper, Banded jasper, Chalcedony, Carnelian agate, Carnelian, Rocks, Geology, Amateur geology, Amature geology, Agate Ariel, Identifying agates, How to identify agate, Whirl agate, Whurl agate, Fractured membrane agate, Moss agate

Id: 54NwNmLphGo

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022