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The Acid Test

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Images

Published: 19 April 2016

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• Prospecting,
• Acid,

Now, playing again with the digital camera and some hydrochloric acid, I've put some of the previously photographed "pebbles" (more grit and grains of sand) in the HCL solution to see which dissolve and which survive. Those that survive - intact - are presumably diamonds...

This is the starting photograph:

You can see the bubbles as the HCL works it's magic. I spilled a bit, always, hopefully the desk and computer are here in the morning, but a time-lapse animation/.gif/vine will help to show me where to steer my attentions...In the past, I never knew which ones "survived" and which ones merely shrunk, and needed more acid to disappear. Now I'll know...

Alberta Amber

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Images

Published: 18 April 2016

Hits: 2614

• Alberta,
• Stones,
• Amber,
• Microscope,
• Fossil,

Check around the visible coal seams in Drumheller, Starland County, anywhere in Alberta really, and you'll probably find some Alberta Amber. Generally small pieces, the size of a pea or smaller, it's brittle and readily crumbles (so you have to be careful), but it does show some beautiful colors...

It could be heated, pressed, sealed in resin to make some interesting jewelry and rings (they do this to the lower grade Baltic amber), but Alberta classes it as a fossil and so collecting is forbidden. Shame. If it were coal, or oil and gas, or simply in coal, you could collect all you wanted and burn it, no problem, but the collecting of it to appreciate is prohibited by law. 

Flood Trees

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 18 April 2016

Hits: 2550

• flood,
• Trees,

I wondered at the trees, the branches that started beneath the ground, the obviously planted forest, odd, and then I remembered the flood a couple of years ago, the trees captured the silt, raised the level of the ground, and those branches nearest died off.