Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Moldavite

Just beautiful and amazing. I'd love to get one myself - the museum grade which is much more expensive than the regular grade. Apparently there are mines for these gems. (Haha.) But it's estimated to run dry in 10 odd years.

Below taken from wiki:

Moldavite (Czech: Vltavín) is an olive-green or dull greenish vitreous substance possibly formed by a meteorite impact. It is one kind of tektite. It was named[citation needed] by A. Dufrnoy as by town of Moldauthein (Czech: Týn nad Vltavou) in Bohemia (the Czech Republic), where it occurs. It is sometimes cut and polished as an ornamental stone under the name of pseudo-chrysolite. Its bottle-green glass color led to its being commonly called Bouteillen-stein, and at one time it was regarded as an artificial product, but this view is opposed to the fact that no remains of glassworks are found in the neighborhood of its occurrence; moreover, pieces of the substance are widely distributed in Tertiary and early Pleistocene deposits in Bohemia and Moravia. For a long time, it was generally believed to be a variety of obsidian, but its difficult fusibility and its chemical composition are rather against its volcanic origin.

LInk to wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldavite

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