Mineral identification P1 - Watch this and You can learn the skills to identify rocks and minerals.

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and today we're going to talk a little bit about mineral identification now you know I get emails everyday people telling me hey how can I send you some pictures because I found some kind of rock and I want you to tell me what it is sometimes it's I think it might be gold or I think it might be diamonds or platinum or some other thing and you know I get so many of those every day that I tell people I can't do that first of all it's way harder than you might think to look at a picture and just say oh yeah it's a Sutton soil mineral and you know if I was doing that every day I'd be spending an hour a day looking at people's pictures so I'm sorry I can't offer that service I tell people if you really don't know how somebody local look at it for you but what I'm going to do today is we're gonna talk about the techniques how you can master learning to identify minerals and you can have a skill of what you need to know to learn to identify minerals now we're going to talk about mineral identification and all the different characteristics that you need to get into to be able to know what a mineral is first off we talked about crystal shape and I got an example here of a crystal and it has a characteristic kind of shape if you knew about minerals you would look at this crystal closely and be able to tell it's a quartz crystal this is actually a large quartz crystal I found when I was prospecting for gold in Australia but it's a really cool specimen and I brought it home because well it was just a lot of fun to find it but quartz crystal right and crystal shape for quartz crystals is really good at helping to identify what they are hardness we'll talk about hardness every mineral has a certain level of hardness quartz happens to be hardness number seven on the Mohs scale which goes from 1 2:10 but we'll talk about all those different ones and we'll look at different possibilities when we talked about hardness in more detail cleavage a number of minerals tend to break in a certain shape here's one right here if you can see that very well but it's a fragment this isn't actually a crystal that didn't grow this way it actually broke it was it was broken on purpose somebody did this you know with a sharp edge you can hit the crystal and it will naturally break in certain fracture ways and the ways that the crystals break are identification to tell you what this crystal is okay and then we get to color now I want to show you here's a clear crystal it's actually a cleavage fragment like this other one here's the crystal fragment the cleavage fragment I showed you just a minute ago and here's my quartz crystal now these are all three colorless minerals right they're minerals that are clear that's their color is clear and if you were to do a streak will talk about streak tests if you were do a streak it would be a white streak for all three of these and yet these are three different minerals that's why I say you send me a picture and I can see the color of whatever it is you found and yet the same color can be three different minerals and in fact all of these minerals come in different colors other than clear quartz can be a number of different colors purple and yellow and reddish and green and a number of different colors Brown this mineral is calcite and it can come in a wide variety of colors greens and reds and a lot of different colors and this mineral is gypsum it also comes in a number of different colors so just having color color is actually the weakest and most worthless of all the characteristics that you can use to identify a mineral and so what people say hey I want to send you picture it's like you're gonna send me one thing that figure out what a mineral is and it's the most worthless thing the color because there's a lot of minerals that actually occur in every color of the rainbow yellow blue red green purple orange you name it they come in whatever color you want them to be in okay and we're gonna take a look at that to luster that's a some minerals have a kind of a pearly look or they look a greasy or oily that's called an adamantine luster we'll take a look at those things magnetic properties some minerals are magnetic you could put a magnet to them and those the magnet will stick that tells you a lot about a mineral and then there's chemistry and chemical tests this particular mineral the calcite if you put a drop of dilute hydrochloric acid on it will start to fizz and bubble because calcite is calcium carbonate you put acid on the carbonate and it starts to bubble just like the fizz in a carbonated drink like Coke or 7up or something like that so there's a lot of different chemical tests that you can do to test for the presence of different elements or different types of chemistry so those are also sometimes used to distinguish between minerals so let's get into the skills that you need to find out what a mineral is oh and one more thing I want to go to is you may say well I can't remember all the crystal shapes and hardness is at cleaváge in color luster all these different properties how am I gonna remember all that stuff well okay this is what I recommend I recommend that you buy a book about rocks and minerals these books this one is a particular one by Simon & Schuster but there's a lot of different ones on the market you can find them on Amazon and even have a little bit about this kind of stuff in my book but there are books that specialize in helping you to remember all the different properties of the crystal shapes and hardness and that sort of thing so that you can identify minerals but we're going to delve right now into take a look at examples of different minerals and some things about the how you test the hardness in the crystal shape and identify that kind of stuff so come along with me and we're gonna delve right into that right now so let's talk about the skills that are necessary to be able to identify minerals in the field you know it really is a skill just like you know learning a trade or something like that to be able to look at minerals and have a pretty good idea what they are now there are you know one of the things about identifying minerals minerals in the field is that it's more difficult than you probably imagined that it is just like you know when you see a plumber or an electrician doing what they do you know it looks easy but it probably takes a lot more knowledge than you would expect the same thing with identifying minerals weathering is something that makes it a lot more difficult I'm going to show you a picture here and take a look at this and you can see there's three different rocks here believe it or not all three of these rocks are exactly the same kind of rock it's and they were all found fairly close to each other within a few hundred feet of each other the lowermost one in the lower right that's silver gray colored is what the rock looks like unweathered in other words the effect of rain and water for a long long time hasn't changed it very much it's been protected so that's what it looks like what the rock looks like the rock that's more in the middle on the left that rock with the kind of purplish color is it's it's been weathered a moderate amount and it changes the hardness and other characteristics of the minerals in that rock and then the rock on the top on the upper right hand it's the same rock - it's just been even more weathered so you can see that that weathering can change a mineral in a very large way and make it much harder to identify weathering can convert minerals to clay these and other sorts of things and it makes it harder to to tell what they are here's an example of a mineral that's been pretty wildly weathered you can see is dark brown kind of black well this is a piece of pie right Pyrrha is yellow and metallic looking this is not metallic looking and it's definitely not yellow so what's the deal with this well this piece of pyrite has been exposed to the wind and the weather not necessarily on the surface but near the surface and it's changed the pyrite into angel limonite or gertie it's an iron oxide mineral so the iron sulphide the pirate has become iron oxide of other minerals and it changes the hardness it changes the color and the appearance but probably if you broke this open you would see on the inside some of the nice yellow metallic looking pyrite that it originally was this is called a pseudo morph it's a false form so on the outside its iron oxides but it has the form of an iron sulphide pyrite so you know whether it can even make what's called pseudomorphs a false form you can see to that whether it changed the color of that little specimen and that's part of why I say that colors are rarely characteristic crystal shapes are an important part of identifying minerals and sometimes in the field pieces are broken or they're kind of lumpy looking and they've been you know changed by weathering and so you lose a lot of times that ability to identify the crystals shape sometimes there are families of minerals that are closely related this is a specimen of garnet and garnet forms a family of minerals there's a number of different minerals that are considered to garments but they're a similar chemical makeup and similar crystal shape and so because they are so similar it's called a family and the family is called garnet but there are individual minerals like Graciela garnet or Andrew diet or you know there's various other different garnet minerals and it sometimes can be hard to separate different minerals in the same family because they have the same crystal shape and a similar chemical and an often a similar density and other factors too so it can be tough to separate minerals in the same family another thing that's worth knowing is common associations a lot of times when you're in a certain geologic environment it's normal to see certain kinds of things so if you're in one type of environment and you know several minerals are pretty common in that sort of environment then yeah you know you will expect to see you have in your mind oh yeah you know this is a this is a pegmatite so I might expect to see tourmaline or mica or some other kinds of minerals you know that's pretty normal for pegmatite types of deposits so knowing those frequent associations that's another thing that's helpful in identifying minerals so field identification of minerals it often can be done but it's not always easy it can be pretty tough to identify a mineral in a field you may need to take it home and do some testing with it and figure out what what the mineral is after maybe consulting a book or something like that you know you may need to consult the reference to figure out what a mineral is like to say it's not always easy but what you know makes a difference like I say it's like a trade skill you know what you learn and what you know make a huge difference in your ability to identify minerals and like I say it's not always easy different minerals have different characteristics sometimes you need to consult a reference to be able to figure out what it is and know what kind of mineral you have but like I say there are different skills and things that you can use to help identify minerals and we're going to take a look at some different ones right now and kind of give you some examples I talked about a little bit of these a little bit about these different categories and things that you can use to identify minerals earlier in this video we're going to talk about it in more detail now but what I want you to see with all these different characteristics like hardness crystal Shay density all these other things is that it's kind of like like the gameshow wheel of fortune have you guys ever watched that or at least seen what it is they have a board with a bunch of spots on the board and and it spells out a word or phrase or saying or something like that and the contestants guess one or two letters letters at a time and the game they feel in the letter so if somebody says well I'd like to see if there's a C in this this saying and and the C's will appear if there is and so you know what normally happens is a few letters will appear and then a few more letters and a few more letters and eventually becomes really obvious what the phrase is because you know you may eventually have most of the letters there and only be missing a few and that's kind of what identifying a mineral is like so you get the crystal shape but you know a lot of times crystal shape by itself isn't going to tell you but then you know the hardness and then you know the color and then you know the density and then you know something else and you put all these things together and it's like being on wheel of fortune and having all the letters filled in or almost all the letters and then you can look and say oh yeah you know it's a felspar you know you'll say that the saying that you know that we all fortune has so that's how I want you guys to think of these diff categories that they each provide another clue as to what the mineral is and when you add them all together then you got to get the answer correctly you're gonna know what the answer is as to what kind of mineral is you're looking at so let's take a look at these right now we'll go through these categories each individually and I'll kind of demonstrate them out for you okay so now we're going to talk in more detail about our mineral identification clues and we're going to start off with crystal shape now that's certainly one that's usually recognizable when you can see the crystal and there's a lot of different ones but there's only so many shapes all the shapes are symmetrical and in other words you can't have a seven faced crystal or a five face crystal because that's not symmetrical but you can have a four or a six or an eight so just to let you know about that now this is a piece of quartz and quartz has a six sided crystal shape but this is a piece of Beryl aquamarine and it also has a six-sided crystal shape so one of the things that's important to note about crystal shapes is there's only so many of them this one is fluorite and it has a cubic crystal shape but I noted to you this is pyrite ore was a pirate crystal and it has a cubic crystal shape also table salt halite the mineral that makes for regular table salt also has cubic structure but all of these crystals a lot of times we'll have modifications that'll help tell you about them one of those is striations now on quartz crystals a lot of times you have the crystal growing a longer axis and along the crystal faces there'll be striations that you can see this one you have to kind of hold it in the light and reflect off it to be able to see the lines but you can see it and that's kind of a characteristic thing where you get the crystal shape with a point and you can see the lines along the crystal that marks you for corpse whereas notice that the top of the barrel crystal is flat and then you have the sides and if you look at this reflection of the sides in the light there are no horizontal striations that's one way that you could tell a clear BEC colourless barrel crystal from a colorless quartz crystal pyrite is another mineral that often has striations along the the crystal face and the other thing too is that some crystals will grow in what they call modifications of a crystal so it you'll see the like pyrite most of the time it's cubic but sometimes it has octahedral or other sorts of modified cube types of shapes and this one is fluorite I mentioned well this green is also fluoride but this cube I don't know if you can see it is kind of a diamond shape it's octahedral this is fluorite it's cubic but they're the same so sometimes the crystals are modifications of one form or another and it may not be as obvious but knowing more about crystals and crystal shape will help you know that so let's move on to our next clue and our in our real a fortune of figuring out what minerals are the next clue that will give us a few more letters in the phrase well hope you guys are enjoying my series on mineral identification minerals are a skill worth learning you know identification of minerals is a skill that can be very valuable I've used my skills to find valuable minerals like gold and gemstones all over the US in fact all over the world this has been part one of a three-part series the rest of the parts will be out really soon I know you'll be interested to see them I'm gonna go into all the things that you need to know to find your own gold silver gems and treasure and if you want to learn more about how to be a better prospector and being able to find gold and silver and gems and treasure well I wrote a book about that and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my book right now so let me tell you a little bit more about my book it's called this full of gold and I wrote it because I want you to be able to go out and find for yourself this full of gold and you can see that it's an encyclopedia with all kinds of information pictures and that sort of thing it's not in color but the color would have cost me a lot more to have printed and so the book would have cost a lot more it's for sale on Amazon and you can pick it up I'll put a link in the description below I also serve as the editor for a prospecting magazine it's icy MJ's prospecting and mining journal and honestly you should check that out we've got stories and information legal stuff everything you know to increase your skills as a prospector I write articles in this every month and a lot of other very experienced prospectors contribute to the magazine as well so check the magazine now also I have a website and the website is at Nevada outback Gems calm I'll put a link for it in the description below but there's gobs of information there that you will find useful in your prospecting efforts finally I want to say that I really appreciate your comments and thoughts and even positive criticism don't come on there and just toss out insults because I'll just delete your comments but if you've got helpful things to say and questions to ask do write and and put those in the comments because I answer my comments to people and you'll hear from me in and you know in responding to you so if you've enjoyed this video and you like what you see and you're interested in finding out more well then sign up subscribe and hit the the notification bell so they'll let you know when I post new videos and you know like it and share it if you again you see stuff that you really are excited about and I'll be coming out with lots more new videos and so we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 17,721

Rating: 4.8931751 out of 5

Keywords: Mineral Identification, rocks and minerals, mineral identification clues, gem minerals

Id: MpkW58ZeQlc

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020