Rough and raw Ruby and Sapphire crystals - what Ruby and Sapphire look like as they are mined

hi I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and today we're going to talk about rubies and sapphires and I'm here at a sapphire mine in Montana behind me I've been here for a few days we've been finding some nice sapphires got a friend of mine owns this property and anyway these are really interesting they're both actually the same mineral it's a mineral called corundum and the only difference between a ruby and a sapphire is just the minor elements that color them because pure corundum is colorless has no color at all but if you had a little bit of chromium then you get a red ruby if you add a little bit of iron you might get a yellow sapphire have you ever wondered what a raw uncut natural sapphire or Ruby looks like well today we're going to take a look at that and I'm going to show you a bunch of examples of raw natural sapphires and rubies now we're gonna take a close look at like I say both rubies and sapphires and how they're mine and the kind of places that they come from and what they look like so you'll know what a raw sapphire or Ruby looks like if you should ever come across one in the deal here's a different view of the pit again you can see the gravel the heavier gravels that are down at the bottom and actually just below the gravel so I don't know if you can see it from this camera view I can sort of see it from standing here down where the water is that there's actually some a bedrock area so basically the gold and Sapphire bare and gravel sits on bedrock or near bedrock and then you see above the overburden that doesn't really carry much of any value as far as gold or sapphires it's all in this lower lower coarser gravel is where the values are and this is the pit that they've been mining from to mine the sapphires and gold now most people when they think of rubies and sapphires they think of nice red stones like this for Ruby and of course nice beautiful blue stones like this for sapphire these are really attractive stones and this is the standard type of stuff that you might see here's another beautiful blue sapphire but sapphires and rubies are actually the same stone it's the same mineral it's an aluminum oxide is really what it is it's a combination of aluminum and oxygen that come together to form this gemstone and the way that geologists and mineralogists and other scientists have always looked at this is that ruby is the red version of this mineral called corundum and all other colors including blue are sapphire so even though most people think of sapphires as blue well sapphires also come in yellow and they can come in orange e colors as well all of these are considered sapphires and in fact sapphires like I say are every color of the rainbow except red because red of course is ruby and here's an example of just an a rainbow array of different colored sapphires now because corundum is one mineral both Ruby and Sapphire have the same crystal pattern and that's shown here you can see a kind of a black really low quality sapphire on the right a ruby and then a blue sapphire this just shows that it has the same sort of crystal pattern that we saw both of them for a corundum because they're both corundum whether they be blue or any other color or red it's all corundum but red is called the ruby and all other colors called sapphire so here is a kind of a gray blue colored stone you'll note if you count carefully around that it has six sides and then this particular piece has flat on the top and bottom that's one of the standard forms for corundum crystals here is a ruby with that same six sided with two flat terminations at each end of the crystal and it's very common for corundum whether that be Ruby or sapphire to grow in this form but rough crystals also form a thing where they're six-sided but instead of making a flat termination on either end in a crystal they come to a point here's some pointed sapphire crystals these are from Ceylon or or Sri Lanka as it's known now and of course here's some more blue sapphire crystals which show this kind of bring pointed type of termination now here's a ruby crystal with a cut gem and you can see the beautiful red color and the six-sided and this one is a little bit of a termination a tempering termination although it doesn't come to a point like some of the others now in order to be cuttable as a gemstone whether it be a ruby or a sapphire it has to be clear enough to cut a gem out of and you can see this sapphire crystal is very clear and would of course make an excellent gemstone if it were caught into a Jim a faceted gem shape now here's some Ruby crystals now these are not gem quality they're excellent specimens but they show how the ruby crystal at least in this environment grew in a white limestone so it makes a striking specimen where you had the beautiful red of the ruby against the white of the limestone here's another specimen of that same type with the beautiful red ruby against the white of the limestone and yet another beautiful red ruby against the white of the limestone this one has a little bit more defined crystal shape or you can actually see faces as opposed to this one which is kind of just a glob and the crystal faces aren't very obvious this would have a higher specimen value and it's not just rubies of course that come in their native matrix here is a beautiful deep blue sapphire it's is actually from Montana from the yoga Gulch area and it's a beautiful blue yoga sapphire in the original lab for fired Dyke that these gems occur in now not all crystals have a great crystal shape in fact as I kind of showed with some of the examples we've already gone through a lot of sapphires are just kind of rounded pebbles some of these if you stare closely enough at the crystal and you roll it around in your hand you can see the six-sided shape that that the standard sapphire ruby crystal will take but in a lot of these it's really hard to see just because it's kind of a little rounded pebble even though these make perfectly good gemstones if they're clear enough now rubies and sapphires are mined usually by smaller scale methods this is an operation in Montana where they're mining gravel like I showed you in the beginning of the video and trucking it to a plant to be processed but it's a fairly small scale operation it's not a big operation where there are dozens of employees this is just one or two guys running an operation on a very small scale here is a very similar scale as being executed in Madagascar and maybe though maybe this is Mozambique I'm sorry I think this is Mozambique and you can see the same kind of scale of trucks and and excavators mining of course in in this example they're mining rubies instead of sapphires from the last example in Montana but still about the same small scale of operation now that actually is pretty decent-sized in the world of rubies and sapphires there's a whole lot of places in the world where their mind just by individual guys in third-world countries taking small pits and holes and digging out the surface and mining the rubies and sapphires again this is an operation in Mozambique where they mined rubies that look like this and you can see the beautiful color here's another example of rubies from that country only these are much higher grade if you look at these closely you can see that the crystals are quite transparent and virtually all of these would cut an excellent gemstone and they're big enough to cut a nice nice gemstone but as I'm trying to say a lot of these places the stones are mined in in very haphazard and ways by small-scale mining you can see these are just people with baskets and ladders and they dig and haul the gravel a way to be processed here is an operation a similar small-scale operation in Thailand where they're mining sapphires another similar small-scale operation with individual miners in Madagascar this I think is a small-scale operation where they're processing the material in Sri Lanka and another very small-scale operation you can see individual people in a pit and handing baskets one to another if you look closely at the baskets the one that has full of gravel is actually flying through the air that the guy down on the lower level has tossed the basket up to the guy with the red hat and he's dropping another basket down to the guy at the lower level that they can fill the basket up now some places in sri lanka they mine in open pits like this but they also mine in very dangerous underground operations where they dig shafts down to the gemstone bearing layers in the gravel and will risk their lives to go down in these shafts and dig the gravel out because there's so much water here you see the green pipe that comes up out of the hole that's to pump the water that naturally collects down there so that the miners can actually work instead of having to swim to work so this is this is a pretty dangerous environment but that's what it takes to bring you the sapphires and gemstones that you're used to now in sri lanka they will process that I showed you a little bit earlier a an operation where they're using a sluice box and sprayed water and washing the gravel through a sluice and capturing the gemstones that way but they also do it in the more traditional way like this with basically shaker screens in a stream it's very primitive but most of the gemstones of this type that rubies and sapphires are mined in what would totally be called a third world country with people who don't have a lot of resources and assets to be mining gemstones and processing them when they find something it's very valuable to them and very precious and it's how they make their money and how they survive so it's very important to them so this is the traditional way now this is an example I mentioned mining in Montana Montana actually produces quite a few different quite a large amount of sapphires in different colors and this is a more modern jig and and centrifugal all based plant that operates in the state of Montana and would have a much higher recovery than the hand sorting and sifting methods that are used in third-world countries but either way they produce handfuls of gems this is a handful of stones from Sri Lanka this is what what the product of all that operation is and you know it's a highly valued and it's very important to the country as far as an export in fact sapphires are valued around the world they're considered very precious and and whether you're in Montana or Sri Lanka or Africa or some other place there's always this opportunity and the sapphires find a ready market and of course if you find a large transparent piece like this a stone like this could make an individual miner rich for years in some of these third-world countries now here's a handful of sapphires from Montana again but you'll notice if you look closely at them that a lot of them are pale colored and even the ones that aren't quite so pale or just kind of a light blue I'm not the attractive beautiful deep saturated blue color that you're used to in sapphires that you might see in the jewelry store in fact here's another set of Rock Creek sapphires that have been sorted out for their color and you can see these are all kind of a pale blue violet kind of color and what happens is is these stones get heat treated they're actually heated to a very bright red heat in an oxidizing environment in which the the Blues that are present or even potentially present are developed to their best level and here's an ink example of this stones after their heat-treated will turn into these stones and you can see here we have something much closer to the beautiful blue color that you're used to in the sapphires that you might see in a jewelry store now this heat treatment process to bring about the better blue color is a permanent type of thing it can only be changed by heating the stone back up to a bright red heat and at normal print temperatures that any gemstone that's in use by people might be exposed to the color is permanent and will not change or vary but it's a very intense process to change these stones this are actually a set of stones in all in the same tray these are the same stones in each of the picture the first set on the left the leftmost set of stones is the stones as they were mined and recovered out of the ground the middle set is the same stones but they have gone through the first step in the process of being enhanced to a beautiful blue color and then you see on the far right is the final result the full blue and the blue colors that you're very used to seeing in a jewelry store and this is what they do with a lot of sapphires from Montana and so these sapphires become very valuable once they've been heat-treated now another characteristic of sapphires and this is a Montana sapphire and it has been heat-treated but this is believe it or not the same stone it's two pictures of the same stone and you don't say well that can't be they're totally different colors well one of the characteristics of sapphire is a character and not all sapphires show this only some do but some sapphires show this characteristic of being different colored when viewed at different angles through the crystal so if you look in one direction through the crystal and you get one color and you reorient the crystal and look through another direction you might get a completely different color as in the case of this stone this is actually a very nice Montana stone it's over 30 carats and I'm sure was cut into a very beautiful gemstone but you can see this it's called Polly crow ISM where they have different colors it really can make a huge difference in the color of the stone and it makes a big difference for the gem cutter because what face you show up for for them you know how will be cut and displayed in a gemstone will make a difference as to the color that the stone is so if you orient the stone one way you may get a deep blue if you oriented the stone and cut it a different way you may get more of a teal green here's some more of the beautiful Montana sapphires out there they've been heat treated and you can see their heat treated to a really beautiful color now there are several places in Montana that produce sapphires one of the best-known is a place called Rock Creek and it's an area there's actually a number of smaller mines in the Rock Creek area that's near the town of Phillipsburg in Montana and you can see the array of colors that this produces and actually most of the Montana sapphire mining districts do produce stones that are in the same kind of light color range light blue light green this that just in the same broad color range this is a set of beautiful sapphires collected from El Dorado bar along the Missouri River east of Helena and these stones are very attractive but again in the same range of colors most of them being on the light side here's a close-up of some other stones also from El Dorado bar at along the Missouri River the upper Missouri River to the east of Helena and you can see these stones are just the same array of beautiful colors but again most of them on the pale side now you notice some bright red stones on the upper part of this picture and toward the the right-hand side those are not actually rubies those are garnets in this these mines at El Dorado throughout a bar and along the Missouri River they produce not only sapphires but they produce a few garnets as well here's another yet another area in Montana called dry Cottonwood Creek that also produces stones of a similar nature now there is one district in Montana that produces a totally different color range and this is the yoga Gulch sapphire this is a different mining district a little bit further away from some of the others and you can see these are a beautiful blue color that have no need of heat treatment whatsoever they're just very attractive as they come out of the ground the only problem with the yoga Gulch sapphires is that they tend to be small they a stone of more than a carat is not terribly common and even a few carats is very rare so a stone that would cut a kind of fight a lot Jim finally of a couple of carats is is quite unusual from yoga Gulch but you can see the color of these stones is is very saturated and really beautiful now we showed that many of these third world countries you know the the Sapphire mining and Ruby mining in those countries is an important part of the economy and many of these countries have made rules to try and limit the amount of rough gemstones that they export and what they do is actually have a cutting industry where the gemstones are cut by local cutters and sometimes the work that they do is really quite good other times the local cutters their work is really not good and the stones need to be recut by better operators once they're exported so I hope you've enjoyed this presentation about the many different colors of sapphire and and Ruby and how the gem is mined and I hope that it was educational and that you'll recognize now what these stones look like in the rough when you might see them in the field now I'm glad you enjoyed that presentation on natural raw ruby and sapphire crystals and how the gemstones are formed and what they look like and how their mind and that sort of thing I'm glad you that you got a chance to see that now if you want to become a better prospector overall so that you can find your own gold and gemstones and the like well I wrote a book about it it's called fistful of gold and the book is written to help you find this full of gold so come along with me I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my book right now okay so I wanted to tell you a little bit more about my book I wanted to be able to share the knowledge that I've gained about finding gold and and how to be successful and so I spent years literally writing this book Fistful of gold it's more than 350 pages long which is why I say it's an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about finding your own gold I've sold more than eight thousand copies and I've got a lot of really great feedback on it it just is the most complete book on the market it has information about finding gold that literally is not available in any other book that you're gonna find for prospectors because I took technical stuff from geologists and other mineral scientists and I've translated that into language that the average guy can understand you don't need a PhD to go out and find gold but the information that scientists have learned over recent decades can can be of a lot of help to people so oh it's in this book if you're interested about finding gold panning sluicing nugget detecting dry washing the geology of gold deposits and how they form it's all in here and like I say it's more than 350 pages long so if you'll just go to the description underneath this video you can take a look I've got a link in there to take you to Amazon to the site where the book is sold and I think you'll you'll really enjoy it take a look at all the people who've commented on this and have really liked the book it has a very very high rating for a book and also I have a website my own free website that you can take a look at I've got all kinds of information on here about doing research and how to find gold a lot of good information stuff that basically couldn't fit into my book and so I put it on this website and I have a link also for that in the video description so take a look in the description and you can click on the link and it'll take you to my website and finally if you like this presentation I've got a lot more coming out here's a three and a half ounces of gold that I found a couple years back in one area I've got a lot more of these videos coming on gold gemstones hardrock placer a lot of metal detecting there'll be lots of metal detecting stuff so if you really enjoyed this click the 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Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 18,646

Rating: 4.8778005 out of 5

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Id: uIW4ldeOqqM

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019