Hey rockologists of the Fediverse, what kind of rock is this? Found in my garden, outer western suburbs of Melbourne. It doesn’t look like the normal kind of rocks we get around here though so it’s probably a decorative piece. #AskFedi
EDIT: appears to be flint? https://mastodon.social/@David_Hollingworth/114980260536704207
I would be excited to find chert in Melbourne, but flint is something else again! And it's *such* a good size!!
I’m pretty sure y’all got a lot of aluminum, nickel and maybe copper too. Titanium can also show up on the surface too.
Geology is pretty neat.
Left picture, the orange spot is iron oxide. It almost even looks like an elemental square iron crystal structure.
Right picture seems to be volcanic glass which would be a high silica content magma that rapidly cooled. The surrounding grayish rock looks like *gestures wildly* igneous rock.
I’m not a rock expert I’m just autistic and like rocks, so I very well could be wrong at least about the gray part.
Fascinating to me to think of how much energy these minerals carry out of the earth through heat and then just become rocks. Like cool the earth just shot a bunch of liquid mineral amalgamation out of its butt and it’s also a mountain.
@jpm
Texture, and colour in particular, can vary between fresh and weathered surfaces. Which is why geologists carry hammers - to get a fresh surface.
Its very difficult to identify from photos. It appears to be fine crystaline material. It could be a flint/chert as others have suggested. The fresh surface doesnt look smooth enough to be obsidian to me.
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