Mineral identification Part 3 - Watch this video to learn the skills of mineral identification.

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and I'm doing a series on mineral identification I'm basically taking the mineralogy class that I took in college that was about years ago and I'm condensing it down to make it something that's easily digestible it that anybody can understand and I'm teaching you the clues that you need to know to find and and then identify minerals now I went through the clues and some of the introduction in the the first two parts of this three-part series and then this third part we're gonna take a closer look at minerals that you would be interested in from gold and silver and different kinds of ores even ores of unusual metals like molybdenum or chromium or something like that we're gonna took a look at a bunch of different things at gemstones and we're just gonna have a great time and then I'm going to talk to you about taking all the information that I've talked to you about in this series and integrating it and putting it all together so that you can go out and find and identify your own minerals when you find something in the field you can say oh that's a piece of quartz or that's a piece of mica or that's a piece of gold anyway I think you'll really enjoy it so come on with me we're gonna do the third part of this three-part series and I think after going through this if you haven't already gone through the first two you're gonna want to go back and see them so let's get started well let's get started with part three of our mineral identification series I hope you found it helpful we've been going over the clues that you need to help identify minerals so one of the things I want to talk about is that field identification of minerals is not always easy you know when you're out there in the field looking at stuff even if you're an experienced geologist you know some minerals can be harder to identify than you might expect one of the things that's really important is that weathering can make minerals really hard to identify weathering can change the hardness change the color obscure or even change the luster and when you change all the clues that tell you what a mineral is well that's gonna be pretty hard minerals are often converted in the weathering process to clay and like I say that changes their hardness they can even be converted to other minerals I showed you earlier a chunk of pyrite that had been converted by weathering into iron oxides like rust and it been converted just by a natural process of weathering so you know identification of minerals isn't always easy now I've mentioned a number of times that colors can vary quite a bit you can have a one mineral but it can come in many different colors lumpy or broken pieces of minerals may not show their crystal shape very well minerals from the same family like garnets can be tough to separate one kind of garnet from another or one kind of mica from another one kind of fell far from another field identification is possible in most cases but it is not as super easy and what you know like I say makes the difference and that's why we're doing this course now we've gone over the clues the identifying characteristics a little bit but I just do a little quick review here the crystal shape mineral hardness the mineral density cleavage cleavage is that minerals a number of them tend to break along certain planes and and those planes can be very characteristic to help you identify what a mineral is now a mineral color you know I've said is is the weakest of all these clues it's the most easily visible and we're gonna talk a little bit about streak testing didn't in just a second because I haven't gone over that and luster whether you know it has a metallic luster or glassy luster pearly autumn on teen magnetism and then chemical tests of course there's some you can do in the field but you know the most thorough chemical tests are done in a laboratory by a chemical company that as all the equipment and unfortunately the the full thorough chemical test can be pretty expensive so let's do a quick review of this I have talked some about crystal shape and how characteristic that is and I just wanted to show you like for quartz you know our upper left-hand side here is a drawing of the classic the shape of a quartz crystal and I've got a number of examples here and you could see examples from all over the world there's some very different examples I'll show this same characteristic crystal shape and one of the things that's about quartz crystals unless they've been polished or done other things to them as they come out of the ground you know you'll see this on the drawing on the upper left the M faces have lines going across them there's a series of growth lines basically as what those are as the crystal grows vertically upwards you get these lines on what are the M faces of the crystal and on all these crystals that I've shown you here you can see that now in the picture you can only see it clearly on the lower right hand one you can see that growth striations that go across the crystal but in real life you can hold crushed quartz crystals if they're of any size and you can see these and it helps identify the quartz crystal now here's a shape acronym which is Ruby or sapphire you can see it's a hexagonal shape when you look down the crystal you get this six-sided shape if you get a good crystal shape and and then usually a fairly flat termination on either end of the crystal but again these crystal shapes can tell you a lot hardness of course each mineral has its own hardness and you can test for that in the field I have here my little field test that kind of showed you this on one of the other videos but here's a close-up of it and it's labeled what each mineral is you can see on the lid it shows you what things are and scratching one mineral with another can tell you the hardness of the you're trying to identify in that Ken you know to give you some real strong clues and then this thing includes a little hand lens for seeing crystal shape and crystals that are small magnet some streak plates and like I said we're going to talk about streak plates in just a second the streak plates basically is an idea that you can grind a mineral on a plate and produce a powder and that way for minerals that are really dark in color you can kind of tell whether it's really dark brown or really dark green really dark blue things like that and that can be helpful I talked about cleavage or fracture and here's some more pictures that help show you this the green mineral on the upper left is actually the same mineral as the clear mineral on the lower left it's both of these are calcite and you can see that the the angles that the mineral tends to break at when you have a cleavage that can be characteristic and so you see in the green the angle of the breakage and then in the low crystal on the lower the lower left is the same angle of breakage and that tells you a lot about the mineral on the right-hand side you see the kind of cubic one with the breakage that's actually on the mineral halite which is table salt this you know you could take this purify it and grind it all up and it would be table salt and it has a cubic breakage and then on the lower right you have muscovite mica which we've talked a little bit about mica and how it tends to break in two sheets now I mentioned a streak and here's a really dark mineral and someone has given it a streak across the plate and you see the powder there is kind of a brown color and this is what you get out of streaking minerals like this you can tell and instead of just oh it's black really dark looking at the powder can give you a clue as to what the actual color is so what is a mineral a mineral is a substance that meets the following five criteria it must be naturally-occurring meaning you know things that are made by man are not really mineral so tungsten carbide which is a hard material lately they've been using it for wedding rings my son's wedding ring is made out of tungsten carbide it's not naturally-occurring it's a man-made product so it's not a mineral inorganic so something like coal which is a product of trees and and that sort of thing compressed down coal isn't is not a mineral it must be solid so water like the ocean isn't a mineral it has a definite chemical composition it can't just be a mixture of things it has to have some kind of fixed chemistry and then an ordered internal structure which means it has to be crystalline so something like opal is not a mineral even though it comes out of the ground because opal is actually a gel it's kind of like like jello only made out of inorganic chemicals instead of proteins is just what real jello is made out of so let's look at some common minerals we're gonna start off with courts and courts actually it's silicon dioxide or sio2 so one silicon and two oxygens and it is the most probably the most common element on the Earth's surface because it's made of the two most common elements in the Earth's crust so silicon and oxygen are the two most common elements in the crust of the earth you put them together and you get quartz so here's some examples that look wildly different you can see the quartz crystals that look like I had showed you just earlier and if you look really closely on the crystal in the back of the piste crystals you can see the growth lines that I mentioned earlier the purple crystals are amethyst and amethyst is a mineral a variety of course it's purple colored quartz the lower-right is a piece of Bain quartz which is the kind of Bain material that gold occurs in but I will tell you that there's a whole lot more Maine quartz than there is gold bearing Maine quartz or name quartz with significant amounts of gold in it there's just a lot more quartz because it's like a saint very very common mineral now the lower-left how looks like a big chunk of wood well it's a big chunk of petrified wood from Arizona and it's been it's a piece of wood that's been mineralized and over a long period of time of being buried the wood of the the log has been replaced by quartz and that's what petrified wood is now here's some more examples of quartz you can see the upper left is gold-bearing quartz and I said gold-bearing quartz is a lot less common than just not gold-bearing quartz but this is an example of what it looks like with a lot of gold shot through it then below is rose quartz this is a pink quartz and then on the upper right is what's called a japan law twin this is basically two quartz crystals that grow together at right angles and this is actually not just a random thing where two crystals just happen to grow together at this angle this is a standard thing that occurs fairly regular when the atoms of the quartz crystals start growing in certain directions and in the right conditions they grow at these right angle crystals and then the lower right is what's called fire agate that's my favorite form of quartz because it's just a beautiful gemstone and it's rare and only hers in a few places but it's just really really beautiful next we have gold and the characteristic things of gold it's metallic luster of course it looks like a metal and then it's super high density now you would say the yellow color is and and yes yes that's true however there are shades of gold that have naturally alloyed silver in them and so you can get all gold all the way from the normal bright yellow that you're used to all the way through pale colors the one in the upper right here is kind of pale a little bit but there's one's a lot paler than that I could have put an example here where it's literally almost just silver color and in fact there are a few districts there's an oral Blanco district in Arizona that's oral Blanco is Spanish for white gold so it does occur in various shades from yellow to silvery colored depending on how much silver is allied with the gold there's actually a separate mineral name for the really pale stuff called electron and then pyrite of course if the crystal is right you can see the cube shape as in the the one on the upper left the one on the right is is cubic also it's just that the picture that I've got here doesn't really show that as well if you weren't able to hold this specimen in your hand you could see that the crystals were cubic shaped and then the one on the lower left that crystals are really small it would be harder to identify the cubes in that but I think some of them at least you could identify it if you were able to look at it closely in person now here's copper or chalcopyrite this is probably the most important ore of copper and it looks golden color and metallic but it grows in in certain crystal shapes and is readily identified it's a little more brassy and and yellow color than pyrite is normally here's some more copper ores these are oxidized copper ores this is what happens when you take air and water and have it act over a long period of time on things like the chalcopyrite I just showed you you eventually produce things like this which is the green is malachite and the blue is as you're right I mentioned metallic silver and of course silver by itself sometimes occurs as a mineral and you can see these strange and weird shapes have done a video on silver and silver horse but this is just a quick look at some examples of metallic silver silver ores themselves you can take a look at these examples they tend to be dark-colored and often kind of looking or earthy but then the thing about that is is that there are a lot of other things that tend to be dark or so you know just because of those two doesn't prove that it's a silver ore you'll need other clues and and it's good back this is this gets back to what I was talking about where you need a series of clues to help you identify your rocks and minerals here's platinum again it's metallic and it's silver colored but this is much more dense than than silver so if you had a chunk of platinum and a chunk of silver in hand they're both about the same size the platinum would be almost twice as heavy as the silver so platinum is actually a little more dense even than gold now speaking of density here's a lead or a very famous LED or Galena it's it's probably the source of almost all newly mined lead comes from Galena and it it has a cubic cleavage and a cubic crystal growth face so both the growth of the undisturbed crystals and if you break them they both break into a cubic sort of arrangement as a high density and this lead color and it's gray color is kind of characteristic when you add those all together that's pretty pretty sure definition or that will guide you to identify a mineral as going up let's take a look at some unusual ores on the Left we have nickel ores the garni right the green is an oxidized nickel ore there are places where this is mine knows an area in Oregon that was mined for this mineral and produced nickel and then the lower left is a sulfide a nickel bearing sulfur mineral you can see the kind of metallic luster that it has and then on the right or cobalt horse the upper right is a pink colored or of cobalt that comes from Nevada and then on the lower right is metallic sulfide type or and this comes from Canada here's some chrome and molybdenum horse on the left is a dark colored mineral that's chromite it's heavy and it comes in a certain area a certain type of geologic environment but it's the chief or of chromium that's used for like chrome-plated bumpers that sort of thing and then on the lower left is another mineral it's this is a lead and chromium mineral that's a kind of an unusual thing but it makes for some interesting specimens on the right we have molybdenite and this is the main or of molybdenum metal that's used as a special strengthener in some types of Steel's that sort of thing but it's a valuable ore and is mined in a number of places across the world here's some manganese ores and manganese is also another thing that gets added to certain steels to strengthen it and here you can see some dark sometimes almost earthy kind of color that it goes with a lot of manganese ores and then iron ores here's magnetite and hematite and on the the right is the magnetite and on the left is the hematite and it doesn't always grow in this kind of lumpy the hematite doesn't grow in this lumpy formation it doesn't always look that way but it makes for interesting specimen while it does but these are the ores the chief ores of iron now our scene of pyrite is an arsenic rich pyrite instead of being the normal yellow color that you're used to with prior right this is usually a much more silvery kind of color due to the high arsenic content it is commonly associated with gold the piece on the left there is a little chunk I picked up off of a mine dump in Western Australia we're showing to my companions there with me and then there's another specimen here on the right but I've seen some really nice Arsene of pyrite and gold specimens from the mother lode country of California to feldspars are a common rock forming minerals here different colors grays buff and pink colors are pretty common and then near this green one in the lower kind of blue green in the lower left is amazonite and it makes for some nice mineral specimens it's not a very common type of feldspar but there's lots of different feldspar minerals and then the mica is also another family of minerals and in general a lot of the lighter colored Mica's are from the muscovite family the darker colors a lot of them are biotite but there are a lot of other Micah's this lavender color and the lower right is lepidolite and is an important or of lithium calcite is a rock forming minerals that it basically is the main mineral of limestone and you can see the the green and then the doubly refractive crystal on the lower right I've shown you those already but these are examples of calcite which is the main mineral that forms the rock limestone fluorite is another important or it's it's it's actually mined for its flora fluorine content it's calcium fluoride is the elements that make up fluorite and it comes in just a wide wide variety of colors and often make some really beautiful crystals and you can see these examples here it's the mineral that goes where they put the fluoride in your toothpaste it that's this is what it comes from garnets is another family of gemstones and minerals are used in mineral in a lot of rocks and you can see example here that's near black I have other examples that are kind of orangey brown and then in the lower right do you there's a little bit of a green colored garnet comes in a wide variety of colors here's an example of Beryl and emerald you can see the blue-green is kind of aquamarine the pink is morganite the yellow version of it is called Gila door and then there's a raspberry red version of it that comes from Utah this is all the same mineral it's called Beryl in the green form it's called emerald of course diamonds come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes generally there's a diamond shape that you can see best in the lower left hand side occurs in a rock called kimberlite but Ackerson in other rocks as well sometimes the corundum family and I showed you at the beginning rubies and sapphires here's some examples of really pretty colored Ruby and Sapphire it has that characteristic hexagonal shape when you can see the shape some like the upper right those are natural pieces it's hard to see the hexagonal shape on those they're just kind of lumpy rounded types of mineral occurrences a tourmaline is another famous gemstone mind it's been mined in in Southern California and up in the northeast part of the country and Maine and some of the northeastern states but it's mined also in Brazil and a lot of other places around the world a topaz is another famous gemstone well known and here's some beautiful crystal examples of it and then turquoise one of my favorites I have some turquoise mines here in the state of Nevada these are some different examples of turquoise which is really beautiful mineral now we've looked at some minerals and let's talk about putting all our clues together because that's the skill that you use to identify minerals and like I say identifying minerals isn't always easy you need a number of clues to help you solve the puzzle of what this mineral is that you're looking at and all the clues together combine to give you the information you needed I told you in the beginning it's kind of like the old game wheel of fortune that they have on the TV where there's a phrase and then the contestants guess different letters and eventually letters will appear and fill in the blanks and eventually it becomes pretty obvious what the phrase are saying or whatever that that that people are trying to guess and that's kind of like minerals you figure out the hardness you see the color you look at the crystal shape you know the association of where the mineral came from you put these things you know different ones altogether cleavage just there's a cleavage and then that will fill in all the blanks and eventually you be able to guess what mineral it is now don't get frustrated if you find it difficult basic mineralogy is a full semester college class it's you know if if I when I took it so many years ago it was a whole semester and they talked about all different subjects and of course they covered more material because they had a lot more time then I've covered here and this just short introduction but you've had a basically one hour condensation of a 50 hour college course so I couldn't cover everything but get reference books and practice that's that's the thing practice makes perfect in its it's a skill and just like any other skill if you practice it you'll learn to get better now I've recommended various books and I'm going to show you one in a second here but there's a book called Dana's textbook of mineralogy it's an old book from actually originally written in the 1800s but still a lot of really valid good information it's not like the science has changed radically since then and common minerals are still common minerals and so you can actually search for this use Google for Danis textbook of mineralogy and if you look on the thing there you can find it's a free PDF file and you can download it and it has drawings it's it's old so it doesn't have color pictures but it has drawings and that kind stuff and of course if you do it right the price is free so hard to complain about free now let's give you an example of solving a mineral identification puzzle I actually posted this on my community forum there on YouTube and this is the thing and I have people guess and there were some people that guessed correctly now I'm looking at the clues that I can see in this picture and that I happen to know the clues the first is that there's this unusual crystal shape note that the faces are triangles and it's a crystal shape that has only four faces the four faces come together to make a full three-dimensional shape and it's four triangles on the surface of this crystal it's much easier to see that in person than it is in this photograph but you can still see the triangular triangular crystal shapes so it's a tetrahedron which is an unusual crystal shape but those shapes do exist it has a metallic luster it was found and a mind that's known for producing copper with some silver and that clue those three clues the tetrahedron shape metallic luster founded a mine known for copper with some silver its tetrahedron which is a silver antimony mineral that like I say often contains significant amounts of silver that's the kind of thing that you do to identify a mineral now here's one a sample that I picked up in the spring of 2019 and I was really pleased because it was it shows us a mineral that's kind of unusual but there's a number of different minerals here you can see and I've kind of drawn numbers and put arrows to them so you can see what I'm talking about now the first one up at the top there this it's colorless has a seven hardness I actually could see in the hand specimen with a loupe I could see those horizontal growth lines along the length of the crystal that I've mentioned a couple of times already for quartz and so that characteristic crystal shape and the growth lines it pretty much identifies this as being quartz number two this is kind of an orange brown you can see that actually the bulk of this mineral specimen is that orange brown stuff and I looked at that and on some of the other parts of the specimen you can see that it has a dodecahedral which is a kind of a spherical crystal shape it has a greater than average density in fact you pick up this whole piece you'll see it's much heavier than you might have expected it to be and so greater than average density and the orange brown color and the crystal shape this is garnet okay this is a variety of the garnet family number three you can see labeled there there's just a couple of these things in and they're growing and this is a dark green colored crystal you know in this picture it's hard to see that looked kind of almost black-ish to dark green but in in real life in a hand specimen you would see real quick even without any kind of street test that this is dark green color so dark green along monoclinic crystals so that that's the crystal shape it has a six plus hardness and although I didn't test the pieces in the picture there I tested some other pieces on this hand specimen and it is epidote which is a mineral that commonly occurs with garnet so it's a mineral Association type of thing where you see garnet it's not unusual to see epidote and then the number four designated this is a dark silver metallic in the picture it looks dark to almost black but if you're looking at it in the hand specimen it's clearly dark silver colored it has a really strong single cleavage and a super soft hardness I mean it's it's super soft and it is molybdenite which is the ore of molybdenum which is actually why I picked up this specimen because it's molybdenum or so that just gives you a few examples of how I look at things and identify things and figure out how minerals what minerals are and that's what I want you to be able to do so after you've had this introduction you know get yourself a book like this the Simon & Schuster's rocks and minerals is a good one it's one the one I use but there's a lot of them out there and they're all pretty good to have color pictures which is the one thing you won't get from Dana's textbook of mineralogy but it does have the things that tell you oh what different hardnesses minerals are and the crystal shapes and different other examples and you can take a handbook like this with you in the field you can throw it in your backpack and once you get out to someplace that you're looking around you know it can help you identify things so I hope you've enjoyed this course because there are hundreds of thousands on the hundreds of there are thousands of different kinds of minerals and books like this will help guide you and I hope that you'll get in to being able to identify manner and that you'll use a handbook like this and you'll get out in the field and use your lens to test it maybe hardness tests and that sort of thing and you'll learn the skill of identifying minerals it takes time but you can do this so that's my series on identifying minerals I hope you've enjoyed it I hope you found it useful and helpful I hope that when you go out in the field next time and you see an interesting mineral or something that you'll have the skills to be able to look at it do some tests figure out the puzzle of what that mineral is now I'm totally open to questions if you watch this series and you have some questions and you want me to give you some information you know be sure and let me know in the comments because one of the unique things that I do is I answer my comments and so anyway if you're interested in maybe seeing other videos like I could do one on petrology which is the study of rocks identifying rocks we've identified minerals I don't even want to identify different kinds of rocks if you know you're interested in that let me know but there's a lot to the skill of being able to find minerals in addition to just identifying them and I wrote a whole book about prospecting mostly for gold but it talks about silver and platinum and even gemstones a little bit and it's called Fistful of gold and it'll tell you what you need to know to be a better prospector 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 Jim's 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 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: 14,450

Rating: 4.8627005 out of 5

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Id: _ab5NngRlVw

Length: 37min 6sec (2226 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020