Thunder Eggs

no you find a few eggs and then you want to find more it's fun and I can get dirty got better odds than Reno and it's better for you I think most prospectors keep a keen eye out for shiny flecks in the rock these rock hounds prefer baseball sized Nuggets or larger that are dull brown bumpy and round I think it's kind of like when you're going for gold and you know kind of the gold rush feeling eggs with the hardest shells you'll ever find it's a good indicator the inside back in behind there there might be something real nice Thunder eggs lure people from all over the world to Central Oregon oh there it could be it Jeff and his daughter Isabel came down from Bellingham Washington gold skull but thunder eggs can have all sorts of different shapes and colors and things inside to unlock the secret allure of thunder eggs you must cut them open only then will you find what Mother Nature has locked inside I've got a bucketful over here and I expect to get two or maybe three but I'm just crazy that way Ric Otero comes to Oregon two or three times a year from Bremerton he's looking for rare delicate patterns hidden inside called a plume if you're lucky enough to find an egg looks like this and you start cutting it like a loaf of bread and it starts having these little feathers in it they call that plume and that's what everybody likes out of a hundred eggs one of them is going to have the plume rock counters like Rick will cut dozens of thunder eggs to find just one that stands apart it's beautiful these ones turned out particularly now which is why I rushed back here to see if I can get some more sometimes the nature will make something that looks like a scene out of the past it look like beach scenes it could look pretty like plural prints I don't know the nature just paints a pretty picture it's nature's the real artist here Nature has deposited a huge percentage of the world's Thunder eggs in one region the high desert of Central Oregon lawmakers named the Thunder egg the Oregon state rock in 1965 in Oregon there's an incredible amount of lava and then that must be why we have so many Thunder eggs you know because you really can't have a thunder egg without lava Laura O'Dwyer Brown is a geologist and curator of the Rice Northwest Museum of rocks and minerals in Hillsboro they have nearly a thousand thunder eggs here filled with agate or opal or Jasper one tips the scales at nearly two tongues another weighs 800 pounds and has never been open to reveal what's inside this is known as the meat ball because it's got you know that bumpy appearance which is unique to thunder eggs as well it's actually got a lot of little thunder eggs stuck to it she says no one really knows how thunder eggs form but one theory says a gas bubble forms in the lava expands as it cools and leaves a hollow hole then over millennia minerals dissolved in water leak down through the porous stone and fill in the gap layer by colorful layer Oregon's thunder eggs are about 60 million years old so there are older than Cascades they think the oldest extent of the Cascades is about 35 million years old they're pretty good-sized there is one place known around the world for holding the mother lode of thunder eggs it's the Richardson Ranch near Madras it's made a thriving business out of letting people buy what they dig out a few other nearby ranches open occasionally - when rockhounding events like the Madras powwow bring in large crowds hi I'm Tim Fisher and I'm a rock holic uh it's an addiction it really gets in your blood Tim and Tania Fisher spent every summer in the hunt for another dazzling hidden gem they really don't have to dig very deep to find it for me it's like the thrill of the hunt I mean that's the big thing you just never know what you're going to end up with and once you get a taste of something really big that you find something really exciting that no one else has found before or nobody's found in a really long time you're just you're hooked instantly it's like a huge treasure hunt but you have to wait to go home and cut it open to find out what you actually I can tell pretty much by the feel of this and the weight of this and half to this that this is going to be a really great agate rock Tonya's confident prediction must wait a couple of weeks to confirm we have Sol's and polishers Tim has to guess which is the best way to cut the rocks they found soon as I decide which eye is up like cutting some wood he wants to cut across the grain to best reveal the mineral pattern inside we do have some agate in there so we got lucky next the egg gets sanded and polished revealing Jasper in yellows Browns even a hint of purple oh that's something in it look at that that's great this is what captivates so many collectors entry comes built into every Thunder egg the rock hounds are the very first people in history to lay eyes on each egg red pad earns trapped for an eternity until now I like something happening in there so there's like a scene happening inside the rock you have to cut a few duds once that's happened a few times and you find out there's something actually inside it it's it's I don't know it's a magical experience no two are the same you might call them geologic snowflakes encased in stone long before humans walked the earth what's amazing is that they don't know exactly how they're formed and as we're digging in here we're in covering earth that's never been dug up by months before it's a real good thing just addicting to look at them they're just so gorgeous nature's the artist we're just the technicians to learn how to let it out

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Views: 2,052,213

Rating: 4.7639003 out of 5

Keywords: thundereggs, thunder eggs, thunderegg, thunder egg, geodes, geology, rocks, rock hunting, rock hunter, rockhound, geode, earth science, geology for beginners, geology for kids, geology 101, oregon science, high desert, eastern oregon

Id: moekCnFjlX0

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 07 2014