Emeralds: a beautiful gem from the gem state

 

This week, I was given the challenge of finding a mineral in my local area and examining it. I spent many hours outside, and found many rocks, though no examples of any pure minerals. I found a lot of basalt, which is (Google tells me) mostly Pyroxene minerals melted together, and a lot of frozen clay, which is apparently made up of "clay minerals." Who woulda thought? But I had an idea which I really liked, and that was to talk about my fiancee's ring. 

Because her birthstone is an emerald, she has a ring with a large, emerald in the center. It's quite a lovely ring. Now emerald is not, of course, a mineral in its own right. However! It is a gem version of the mineral Beryl, which is a silicate mineral typically found in Igneous rock deposits worldwide. What really fascinated me was the realization, which hit me when I was looking at her ring, that there must be emeralds in Idaho! We are, after all, a large state with vast lava fields and dormant volcanoes, and there are a lot of gems (such as Emerald Beryl) which come from volcano sites. 

I started doing research into the gem scene here in Idaho, and I was amazed to realize that our nickname, "The Gem State," is not some random monicker meant to allude to our state's natural beauty. Rather, it's because outside of Africa no other location has such a large variety of mine-able gems! Think about that! In order to find another place with as many varieties of naturally-occurring gems as Idaho, you have to go to Africa. Not South Africa, not Ethiopia, not Egypt or Morocco or Chad. The entire continent of Africa!! That's incredible! 

Now, sadly, you can't just go out to Craters of the Moon and find emeralds lying around in the dirt. That would be a wonderful thing. We would have a real life Oz right here in the Gem State! But it's not a thing. But that doesn't mean that we can't appreciate the vast realm of treasures which lays beneath our feet. When I look at that emerald up there, surrounded by tiny diamonds and embedded in a white gold setting (gold itself being a mineral, and white gold being yellow gold mixed with Nickel and Zinc) I don't see a beryl mineral which was formed through crystallization under low pressures but incredibly high temperatures and which is found in deposits of volcanic igneous rock and some types of metamorphic rock. Not yet, that's why I'm in this course. What I do see is something beautiful. And one of the great things about geology is that you get to look around at beautiful things and go beneath the surface, if you will, to what makes them what they are. And I love that so much.

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