Welcome back to the channel everybody! Question
for you: do you know what an agate is and if you were to see a photo of an agate would you be able
to identify it? Would you be able to identify all agates? What about jaspers? Do you know what
an agate really is or what a jasper really is? I think a lot of people out there, if you're
watching this video, maybe you said yes to those. Maybe you think it's a clean-cut, clear topic. And
I'm kind of here to tell you that you're wrong, it's not. Uh, a lot of it is very subjective,
it's up to the person looking at something and we're gonna try to unmuddy the water a little
bit. You know there's a lot of common names that people have for this stuff and I have behind me
right here on the table a pretty good selection of different uh agates and jasper and things that are
a mix of the two. And I'm really going to try to unmuddy the waters because I see a lot of
incorrect things. I see a lot of people being like "Actually!". Um, put all that aside, let's look
at what we have here. And if you stay tuned for the whole video, if you learned something I would
love it if you would hit the subscribe button, it means a lot to me as I try to grow this
channel and get the word out there about some of these different topics. So let's look at this.
Well, what do you think of this display of rocks? Is everything here jasper? Is everything
here an agate? What if I told you there were a couple of things in here that were
neither one of those? What do you think, are you able to easily pick those out and
uh are you sure about your uh, assessment? We're going to show, get really into this.
I'll show you what we have here but first off let's lay some ground rules because we've got
to kind of talk about what all of this stuff is. You have rocks which are made up of minerals.
Minerals are made up of elements. Okay that's everything, all rocks that you would ever see it's
it's gonna land in those cat... three categories. Within that, when we start to talk about agates
and jasper they're all microcrystalline quartz or microcrystalline quartzite. That's what they
all are. The micro part refers to not being able to see the crystalline structure. So, the
difference is: can you see the crystals? Okay, do you see the crystals? No you don't because you
would need a microscope to see these crystals. Can you see the crystals?
Absolutely you can see the crystals. This being just quartz. There we go. That's the difference.
However how about something that would trick you up? What about this? Can you see the crystals? You kind of can. What would you call this?
Is this microcrystalline quartz or quartz? I hope you understand what I'm doing here which
is I'm trying to lay a little bit of groundwork: that some of this stuff is in the eye of the
person looking at it, and it's probably not a good practice to spend your free time trying to
correct people. Okay, there's a lot of that in the rockhounding world. A lot of that nonsense
exists on Facebook and in comment sections. And typically uh the ones that I see, everybody's
wrong. So let's try to right that ship. So we know what rocks are made out of. We know a
little bit about micro crystalline versus crystal. All agates and jasper are going to be
microcrystalline for the most part, we're going to get into that, for the most part. It's hard to
also talk about translucency...what's translucent, what's transparent, what is opaque? So, but we
kind of have to get into that subject a little bit. And that's another thing where what I think
might be opaque and what somebody else might think is opaque and then are two different things. And
then also we have the issue of things that kind of straddle the line between tran...semi transparent
and opaque. Like what if it's half the rock you know? It gets...the waters get muddy! The waters,
the waters get muddy. Well, for the most part all of these things are silica, right? So your uh your
quartz crystals, your microcrystalline quartz, um it's all silica. Now, the way agates typically
form is you're gonna have a crack, a void, an air bubble in like a igneous rock. Water that has a
lot of dissolved silica in it washes into that, washes out, washes in, washes out. As it does that
you get small deposition of silica in that void and over hundreds of thousands of years- we
actually don't know how long it takes for that silica goo to fully solidify, but when you, when
have, when you have that and you have different minerals present within that silica rich water
you get things like this, right? You get that, that classic banded agate appearance,
right? You can get agates that kind of look look like this. We have that banding
running through there, it's kind of weird. That's basically what all agates come
down to: silica rich waters getting into an open space and solidifying.
Typically your agates will be found in igneous rocks but you can also, they've been
found in sedimentary rocks, but it's more common in areas with that volcanic activity that would
have produced igneous rocks like we have here. What this is is a piece of basalt and what
we have here is an agate that formed... sorry about that, what we have here is an
agate that formed in an air bubble in basalt. How cool is that? It's an
agate in its natural state. Of course, you start to have erosive features
in things and you know, agates going into creeks and stuff like that, they get tumbled up, it gets
more and more difficult. Here's a good example of an agate that formed in a crack, a seam, a seam
agate. And you can see that different deposition of silica rich waters that had different colors
of minerals in there and you can actually see the impression of the rock that this formed
between, on both sides. Jasper on the other hand are generally going to be more opaque,
right? So here we have a piece of jasper and here we have a piece of chalcedony, which
doesn't have much uh extra mineral to it. It's really just a very pure micro crystalline quartz.
I mean, you can see there's a little bit of color, there's a little bit of iron in here
most likely getting that orangish color. But you can see the difference between
something that is totally opaque and something that you could start to get
into that translucent, transparent look. Your jaspers, like that, and that, and
that, and uh we'll talk about this guy here. How about these two, right? Look at this jasper. What do you think formed this? How do you
think jasper came to be? Typically, it's going to be particulate, like you know little eroded
things, that are now cemented together by silica and that's why you get these different
colors and stuff to it. Now this isn't an identification video. We have one
of those, I'll link it right up there. Now, what's your assessment of
this? What would you call this rock? Is this an agate or is it jasper? I've heard
people call these things jasp-agates. I've heard people call things like this claspers. [laughs]
I've heard all kinds of things. Okay. With a rock like this I would say the answer is somewhere
in the middle. You could call this an agate, you could call it jasper, you could call it jaspagate,
you could call it uh microcrystalline uh quartz, you could call it silica. I mean you could call
kind of whatever. So they're not really a right or wrong answer with this because there's portions of
it that are uh very kind of clear and banded and light could shine through it, and there's
parts that that would not, will not be able to. You can also have some very clear agates. You can have agates that have different features. That has uh botryoidal features on the
inside and slight pluming around the edges, very complex. Or you know it's, it's
a big, big world out there, right? Do you see anything here that
wouldn't fall into that category? We kind of have an idea now of what agates
generally look like. You know they can be all kinds of things and people will use uh the common
words freely and I don't think they should really be corrected. I'm not one to uh get hung up on
language. But how about this? What do you think? This would typically be called carnelian. It
can come in a number of hues but essentially carnelian is a microcrystalline quartz
- silica with iron that gets this beautiful orangish red appearance to it.
Some people would call this an agate, some people would try to correct
that person and say it's carnelian, but does that matter? I say it doesn't. It
doesn't matter, doesn't freaking matter to me. Um, okay a lot of people would call this here,
piece of picture jasper this was sent to me, some of you may have been eyeballing this guy back
here... What do you think of this picture jasper? Psych not picture jasper.
This is a piece of rhyolite. But, could these two be cousins? I don't know,
you tell me. They're not but uh you know, I think that's interesting to see that type of similarity
and stuff and how confusing this can get. Moving right along, what about this guy? Can you see the crystals? Can you
see a crystalline structure in there? So is it an agate? Is it microcrystalline?
We have clear silicas have deposited and then, you know this, this outside
and then crystals formed on the inside. So is this transparent,
translucent or is this opaque? Here's that same material. Right? You can see little dendrites
in there. Sorry about that. I'm not going to take up too much more of your
time but I'm just trying to illustrate some of these things and kind of prove a point,
right? That agates and jasper, quartz, microcrystalline silica, all of this stuff:
it's not, it's not as cut cut and dry. It's not as clear all the time. What about
this? What do you think about this? Agate? If we know that agate has to be or is supposed to be microcrystalline
which means you can't see the crystals, what would you call this? We have here
clear crystal structure. We also have some portions that don't have crystal structure.
You can see the void in which this formed. It reminds me a little bit of the whole
thunderegg and geode thing, right? Like a a thunderegg can be a geode but a geode can't be a
thunderegg... is that how that goes? A thunderegg can be a geode but a geode can't be a thunderegg.
Um, essentially that's in reference to the void... We're getting a little in the weeds here, I know. Grab one more thing up here. Thunderegg, geode. A thunderegg that could
be geoded. Solid, not solid, partially solid. You can also have agatized things. So
we have a piece of agatized wood here. A piece that I collected. What about this? Is this an agate? It's not transparent. It's not translucent.
It's clearly banded. It's definitely silica. Maybe in a future video we'll get into what
formed some of these different types of agates and how it's possible for for these things
to come into existence. But for right now I just kind of wanted to do a little show and
tell, laying the groundwork for future videos, future conversations here on the channel. I
appreciate you stopping by, looking at some rocks. I hope I managed to clear up some of these
things for you and uh kind of really showcase some of what agates are and jasper. These,
these different rocks and minerals are, well, it's not always uh a perfect textbook
example. But uh thanks for coming by, hit the subscribe button, hit the like. I appreciate you.
Catch you on the next video everybody. Take care.
