What's My Rock? #4 — a rock identification show

hey there Professor look what I brought now tell me what's my rock all right we're here with Steve and Colleen and they brought us in a couple of rocks to look at and we're gonna see if we can help them out thanks for coming in today sure happy to happy to have you guys in first I want to ask you where you guys uh what town you guys live in San Bernardino okay great and you have a couple of specimens here and uh let's go ahead and have a look at them they look um they both kite have a bit of a different color this one's sort of uh um they're both very dense um and this one has sort of more of a you know more of a pure pure metallic silver look and this one kind of has a little bit of a like a metallic silver but a little bit of a gold slightly gold tint to it would you say right yeah I didn't notice that until I got it again yeah yeah when you put them next to each other you can see there's a slightly different color um uh they're extremely they're very very dense they're very heavy for their size right so so why don't you tell me about where you guys uh where you found them well my husband brought this home from work he's a landscaper I don't know if he found this on a piece of property that he was working on okay if he did it was in the Empire somewhere okay but or if a customer gave it to him because he gets a lot of gifts from these questions sure sure um yeah it looks pretty clean like I'm not sure you found this in a yard it looks like somebody would have given it to him but um I actually chipped off a little piece of it okay good but um it was metallic and it wasn't or magnetic okay I stuck the piece back on it and pushed on it and it stayed and it took kind of a little bit of force to get it back apart okay so it was kind of yeah I was kind of um surprised by that okay so there you put a magnet you this is neither of them are magnetic I don't know for sure I know that the piece wasn't magnetic magnetic to this rock it would fall off we've got a little magnet here so let's see here's a magnet um nope it's definitely not I'm able to slide it around let's try this one this one is probably not magnetic either right yeah yeah so neither of them I agree they're not okay so your husband found this on uh on a or your husband just brought it home yeah who knows yeah who knows what husband's doing yeah I don't know um so um and where did this one come from this one I dug up in somebody's yard looking for their septic tank oh okay it was in the UK okay looking for a septic tank and then okay you know that didn't come out of a septic tank that's that's uh so it looks pretty it looks like you've cleaned it up pretty good um I just basically hosed it off yeah yeah okay it's got little it's got some little holes in it um it's very very shiny so I thought it was because you can see where it kind of melted the stuff down and it kind of ran yeah okay so I don't know okay and this one we're just my Google Lens did before I Google Lens this before we got here Google Lens what's good you take a picture and then you push Google Lens oh Google Lens okay I thought I Google Lens so it said it was silica and then it said California I put four different suggestions up there on California or something like that and two other ones all right the one was titanium and the other one was Platinum okay um well um you know first of all there there's no I would say the fact these aren't magnetic um um that's probably not going to be these are probably not going to be meteorites because the meteorites contain iron metal mostly iron metal but not all meteorites but the meteorites that we would think these might be which are called the iron meteorites you can paint a lot of iron um and it's going to be magnetic when a meteorite comes from space it goes through the atmosphere it burns up as we've seen on a million science fiction movies um and so what that does is that kind of melts the outside of it and it gives it a really kind of a really distinct Blobby looking texture and it has these little um little it almost looks like imprints of your thumb yeah that's correct so that's usually what we would see this doesn't look like it's had any kind of a we would call it a rind like you know they have a rind of it like an orange rind to the outside geologists like to use that word too it just means there's then outside of it has been melted a little bit it's kind of a skin this to me looks like there's no um there's no rind to it that's been melted or anything same thing with this one too um this to me looks most like um it would be some kind of a sulfide but it's really odd this the first question I have anytime I see these things are is is it natural or not or was it some sort of human-made product um and I think both of these things look like they are strangely some sort of a human product so it's not quite clear um to me what what they would have been made from so what we're going to do is we're going to use this instrument here okay this is called an x-ray fluorescent spectrometer what this is going to tell us is what elements are in in these materials um and you know the periodic table has elements Like Oxygen iron aluminum and so this is going to tell us the elements that are in it so what kind of process that's man-made would make something well I mean the same process that would make any kind of metal right I mean so this goes back it goes back to the Iron Age right you get an iron ore so when iron ore comes out of the ground um it's not um it's not a metal that you would recognize you know like you know like a shiny metal it's just an ugly Rock maybe it's red or brown or something and so what you got to do is you gotta you gotta typically what they would do is they would take like graphite or they'd take charcoal and you burn it with with iron ore and the charcoal mix takes the oxygen out of the iron ore and converts it to iron metal so um so that's that's the process it's called smelting right they've been doing that is that the coke that they use or something called Coke they're used in an iron making process yeah that's that's right they would use something similar to that um so this so x-rays are going to come out of that little hole right there I'm going to put it there's no danger as long as you don't put your hand right there so we're gonna put this over here um that's perfect I'm gonna put it right there does that look lined up Dylan okay okay you know what first you gotta turn the darn thing on how about that he's not gonna get x-rays because he's she'll go stand over there this is the part Dylan this is the part where you get to pretend like you're a dentist yeah get the best on and yeah okay that's right start okay so starting to analyze and what I'm seeing over here so we're seeing um a lot of iron coming up I suspect this is an iron sulfide as I said so I think we're going to see a lot of iron and a lot of sulfur that are going to come through and that's not magnetic that's not a magnetic material just because you have iron doesn't mean you're going to have gonna have so that's magnetic we're getting a lot of iron um little hints of a bunch of other stuff it's very dirty very dirty Rock potassium calcium chromium let's see silicon as well this is a complicated Rock so this is called a spectrum okay and it just tells you what elements are in here and this peak right here is Fe which is iron and this peak this peak is also Fe which is iron there's little tiny Peaks down here chromium a very very tiny amount of nickel copper there's not enough Nickel in here for me to to raise an eyebrow that this might be a meteorite it's mostly mostly iron um why is there two different Eddies uh the reason these these Peaks come up is because we're sending an x-ray beam into that material and it's what we call exciting electrons so the electrons get excited they get they pop out to a higher energy and then they return to their resting state when they do they emit energy and and so what that means is these are you know how an atom looks kind of like a like a bunch of circles around the center so each one of those circles is inhabited by electrons and so each individual electron has a certain amount of energy to it okay when we added x-ray to it it energized makes it come alive and then it comes back down and releases energy and so each electron has a unique address and so each energy here is related to the address of each electron okay okay it's called Quantum mechanic quantum chemistry really Quantum quantum mechanics so this these two peaks here are due to iron so let's see what else we can find um this is spectra two let's do Spectra four all right so here we go so here's our Spectrum we've got here's our iron over here and then there's a quite a bit of of silicon over here so silicon is is a very common the second most common element in Earth's crust um they're calling this argon I'm not believing that sometimes it doesn't identify it very well but there is a fair amount of silicon in there um uh but either I'm not I'm not seeing a lot of that iron nickel combination that I'd want to see for this so um so I'm not seeing the the outside that looks like it has a rind and also I there's nothing in the back story that you know sounds sounds like it could have been like it was you know if you found it in the middle of an ice sheet but you know that's where people find meteorites they go to ice they go to Antarctica yeah and and if you're in Antarctica and you see a black rock in the middle of an ice sheet that probably came from space and so um there's nothing about the way he didn't report anything interesting about how he found it um uh there's no um there's no sulfur in there I thought it might be some kind of a sulfide but it isn't so um so this is some kind of a weird um industrial byproduct let me get up my trusty hand lens here there's some unusual striations in there that um they're not what you'd see in a meteorite and the outside is definitely not does not look melted it looks well it looks broken but this I mean this this part is broken here there's this is part of a bigger chunk it's got a lot of really tiny bubbles in it which is normal for some kind of a slag because of the slack the steel making process creates a lot of gas and it has mostly iron some silicon in it which is not totally unusual because sometimes they use Silica silicate materials to to create Steel in ways I don't know I mean it's got a cool story to it yeah that's different so I'm gonna that's something let's go ahead and let's zap this one [Music] and also I didn't see a lot of usually we'd see a bunch of sulfur if they were salt if they were a sulfide but I'm not seeing a lot of that so um [Music] so that's a that's a strange we get a lot of odd specimens when people bring stuff in it's kind of hard to understand what it is because you know people do all kinds of weird things in the desert you know right okay so of course they didn't know it so that's right there is that okay kind of people out there yeah okay so let's reconnect here right now we're going to analyze this one um this one looks um the shine of it looks kind of reminds me of a mineral called molybdenite which just has a lot of an element called molybdenum but I don't think this is molybdenite because it doesn't have it's not flaky modern night is a flaky mineral I think this is going to be some other unusual I mean unusual slag maybe some a little bit of Slack okay so the main thing here um the main element that it's picking up here is silicon the really really big pink for silicon it's pretty hard to make silicon metal though so I'm a little skeptical that's exactly that's what's going on here yeah it's got a lot of fractures in it um nothing um so if you hit a hammer it would just shatter yeah it would it would break up into into the piece into little bits um that are not predictable just sort of like a class very unusual and it's got all these it's got a lot of bubbles in it too and the bubbles are um you know they kind of look like they're aligned like if I look at it here I don't notice the Bubbles as much as when I look down this end so it almost looks like there was like maybe it was sitting like this and the bubbles rose up as it was forming um it's a very unusual material uh for sure uh nature will not make Nature's does not make silicon like this um it's weird that it was where I found it you know I mean what was it doing in Yucaipa just above the well it was pretty close to the septic tank right off when I was broken for it but yeah this is really unusual let me look at the data one more time raw data it's the chart a little bit not very much iron mostly it's silicon so this is really unusual so according to the xrf this is mostly silicon metal some oxygen in it this might have some Quartz in it but somebody made a big chunk of silicon I mean this is the kind of stuff that's in computer chips by the way right silicon oh yeah yeah not silicon oxide but silicon just regular old silicon so um so that's really weird I don't know what people were up to it takes a lot of energy to make this too to take that oxygen out of silicon is really unusual so I don't know what to make of it but I don't think it's natural let's put it like that right okay so there's no rind on the outside which which it would get from space right the composition is is not what we'd expect for a meteorite uh uh and you know the fact that you found it while digging that doesn't mean it couldn't be a meat Amino you could find a meteorite while digging yeah so um but I don't I don't think it's meteorite yeah I don't think it's and also there's a lot of these these bubbles in here would not you would not get bubbles uh we call them vesicles if you want a fancy word you wouldn't get vesicles in a uh in an iron meteorite um and uh and there's the composition isn't quite right I don't know what it is this is very common for me not to know to know hey who knows what who knows what the um this is this is I like this sample this is a neat sample just because it's I think it's pretty much muscle silicon and it's really hard to take oxygen so silicon is much happier to to hang out with oxygen because we have a lot of oxygen around this way and for silicon to have the oxygen removed um is really something that takes a lot of energy and a lot of effort so someone really um really did something with this thing I don't know you know they're probably not particularly valuable but they're definitely need specimens so I would just explain display them with Prague [Music] yeah exactly that's all I wanted exactly so I was really curious because it stuck back together it stuck back to itself yeah there could be some you know you know that could that could have been a might have been a coincidence of the particular shape maybe just fit in really well or there could be some there could be some attraction in there but um I don't think it's because of magnetism right no I know I know because of that yeah it's just the way it chips yeah thanks for uh yeah thanks guys Steve thank you so much okay Dylan so let's uh let's decompress what do we got here um we'll start with um the uh the big The Big Shiny looking one oh big big shiny yeah yeah you seem to know what that was yeah I've seen that at a few Gem and Mineral shows uh walking around never one that I was interested in purchasing but that did strike me as what they were advertising in Silicon and then we off camera we checked on mndat and it's like yeah that looks pretty similar that's totally it yeah so not not a natural material yeah completely artificial I mean some of the prettiest rocks out there actually are artificial I mean I've come across carburundum which is silicon and and iron and it's just a byproduct of um smelting yeah I think I'm not exactly sure about the processes for silicon but it's it's definitely man-made yeah yeah yeah definitely it threw me for a loop because I I don't really hang around the gem shows so if you saw it there I mean you know so um that's a good a good identification there good good job okay um and let's see the next one they had that smaller one the denser one um and in fact it's funny because I said that the bigger the Silicon was dense but I was really I was biased by the by the the smaller one but because the Silicon was not really particularly dense but but the little guy was it's kind of a bronzy looking color um and so that one came back um if I recall iron and some silicon in there too okay and what else was in there as smatterings of different elements I think it was like iron and silicon were the two biggest Peaks but so what do you think about that one that one it didn't seem natural I mean in the texture of it but also in the chemical analysis look you're looking at the ratios of those of those elements is like uh I guess you can get iron oxides but they would they wouldn't really come across I'm thinking like magnetites and hematites they they look very different yeah so my original thought was that it could be or my kind of reminds me of a lot of sulfide minerals like a for example a massive sulfide deposit so it could have been all kinds of innumerable sulfides pentlandite you know hazelwoodite or something um uh even you know Calico pyrite kind of thing although it didn't have the the coffee the iridescence to it um but it looked it reminded me of sulfide but there wasn't any sulfur in in the xrd zero okay so or if there was a trace maybe I don't know but it wasn't nothing no significant amounts nothing I'm going to write to my mother about for sure yeah um so not a sulfide the color was a little odd um it was a little bronzy so um I didn't really think about that when we were analyzing the elements but um but some weird Swag yeah you know I agree with that one as absolutely man-made I think so that's a that's a new one for me definitely not not a meteorite not natural for sure so yeah definitely all right well that's it okay all right until next time stay tuned yeah [Music] I know you're proud of what you've got but this rock ain't worth Tilly Squad I'm not saying that you'll never be wealthy but this preoccupation doesn't seem healthy don't give up your day shall be better keep it a hobby on the weekend [Music]

Channel: Tectonic City

Views: 5,304

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Id: ugfOSOsDDyw

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023