Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Every portion of Crystal Cave has at one time been heavily crusted with calcite crystals, mainly of the dog-tooth variety, and any barren places are so either because the surface has been removed for specimens, or thrown down by the violence of an earthquake.
The ceiling, walls, floor, and groups of fallen rocks, are all unbroken masses of pearly calcite in crystals of varied sizes, with here and there a patch coated over with pure white carbonate of lime, or supporting a bunch of fragile egg-shell, which is a thin, hollow crust of lime carbonate, almost invariably having the pointed form of the dog-tooth spar.
The bent and metamorphosed condition of the calcite shows the shearing and crushing which the rock has undergone. 11 Phyllite same location as No. 9. A dark red, finely laminated rock consisting chiefly of decomposed biotite and feldspar, occasional quartz grains and sericite and much iron oxide.
The hands are in constant use and soon become so sensitive that holding a soft handkerchief gives infinite relief; but the worst experience is the "crawls" where only the soles of the feet, being temporarily turned up, seem safe from the savage treatment of the sharp calcite dog-teeth.
Climbing up into a hole in the wall of this room, with no little difficulty, the Aerial Lake is the reward of a breathless upward struggle, and a satisfying one. The Lake is very small, but under its clear surface can be seen numerous growing deposits of calcite, while the roof of onyx gleams with a mass of small white stalactites.
Where creeping water ooze, and where rivers wind, Cluster the rolling fogs and swim along The dusky mantled lawns. Thompson. Here we find caverns that for variety and beauty of their calcite formations excel many if not all caverns of the same kind in the world. The valley at Luray is ten miles wide, extends from the Blue Ridge to the Massanutten mountain, and displays remarkably fine scenery.
The most valuable mineral is sulphur, the supply of which appears to be inexhaustible. The chief exports are wool, oil, fish, horses, eider-down, knit goods, sulphur, and Iceland moss. Transparent calcite, a mineral commonly called "Iceland spar," is found, one mine of which furnishes an excellent quality. It is highly prized by mineralogists on account of its double refractive qualities.
Under the resistless pressure of crustal movements almost any rocks, sandstones, shales, lavas of all kinds, granites, diorites, and gabbros may be metamorphosed into schists by crushing and shearing. Limestones, however, are metamorphosed by pressure into marble, the grains of carbonate of lime recrystallizing freely to interlocking crystals of calcite.
10 Schistose Limestone Same location as No. 9. A white rock having a peculiar mottled appearance due to the inclusions of decomposing biotite which project from the surrounding mass of calcite. There is some sericite present, also magnetite, resulting from the decomposition of the biotite.
Quartz, dense and milky, also in quartz of nearly every colour and appearance, saccharoidal, crystalline, nay, even in clear glass-like six-sided prismatic crystals, and associated with silver, copper, lead, arsenic, iron as sulphide, oxide, carbonate, and tungstate, antimony, bismuth, nickel, zinc, lead, and other metals in one form or another; in slate, quartzite, mica schist, granite, diorite, porphyry, felsite, calcite, dolomite, common carbonate of iron, siliceous sinter from a hot spring, as at Mount Morgan; as alluvial gold in drifts formed of almost all these materials; and once, perhaps the most curious matrix of all, a small piece of apparently alluvial gold, naturally imbedded in a shaly piece of coal.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking