•Feldspars are the most diverse and widespread minerals in the earth’s crust. •Moonstone is the most familiar gem-quality member of the feldspar group. •Moonstone is a part of the feldspar group, and is a variety of the species orthoclase within that group. •Moonstone is a composite of two feldspar minerals, orthoclase and albite. After the orthoclase and albite have come together they cool and separate into alternating layers that are stacked on each other. •Moonstone is known for having an ethereal misty glowing look. This phenomenon is called adularescence.
•Adurlarescence is occurs when light falls between the stacked layers of orthoclase and albite and scatters it.
•Rainbow moonstone has a multicolored adularescence over a light bodycolor. However it is not actually moonstone. It is a variety of labradorite (often from Madagascar) and rainbow moonstone is a trade misnomer.
*The necklace features moonstones and labradorite set in silver. It was made by Danish Designer Georg Jensen between 1915-1927 and currently resides at the Victoria & Albert Museum.*
man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh
The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale.
the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going.
To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang.
Appreciate them while they are still here.
I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…
They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.
There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.
That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.
The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older thanbones.
see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?
those are over a billion years old.
that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?
algae.
those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.
so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.
The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.
not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:
the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.
show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.
“Though most scientists believe that a series of volcanic eruptions, occurring in large pulses over a period of a million years in what is now Siberia, were the primary cause of the end-Permian extinction, the lag between the land extinction in the Southern Hemisphere and the marine extinction in the Northern Hemisphere suggests different immediate causes.”
In Switzerland, the Rhine river cascades between Schaffhausen and Zürich. It is the largest waterfall in Europe which was formed during the last ice age.
