this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Cool Rocks

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Some Kind of Translucent Mineral (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 months ago by SillyDude@lemmy.zip to c/cool_rocks@lemmy.today
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I found this in the dirt today. All one piece of whatever it is. Mostly greyish translucent with very oriented lines of brown in the corner section that makes it glow orange in the sunlight. The edge looks like it breaks like flint or obsidian. But the larger surfaces are like very smooth bark on a tree branch. Any ideas what it is?

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[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

probably some kind of agate, but I'm no expert. Minerals tend to live in categories and are themselves often compounds of other minerals, so it could be layers of different minerals that have their own names, the collection of which also has a name.

I'm going to chance and say carnelian agate.

[–] SillyDude@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Very probable that's it. TIL agate is just quartz, which there's a lot of where I found it. I think there's actually a ton of agate in the area, they just aren't pretty. Mine doesn't look like anything online from a quick search but the translucent material with the stripes sounds a whole lot like agate. It only looks orange because of the light that's reflecting off the brown impurity, its not a translucent orange.

[–] Ziglin@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I was going to say it looks like some kind of quartz with impurities. I didn't know agate was exactly that.