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AprilW
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Gravel Find
Feb 7th, 2023 at 8:24pm
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I found this in my driveway gravel this weekend. The quarry it came from is in the wake forest/north raleigh area of wake county in NC. I got some close ups. So let me know what you are thinking.

The full views are shown wet. The close ups are dry. I was unable to get a streak but it does not appear to fluoresce. And the intertwining minerals make it hard to do more.
  
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IDLassie
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Re: Gravel Find
Reply #1 - Feb 9th, 2023 at 8:00am
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AprilW, I can't help you but the close up of the blue is incredible.
JoeM must be real busy not to answer after a few days.
  
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JoeM
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Re: Gravel Find
Reply #2 - Feb 9th, 2023 at 11:01am
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Me busy, HA! Heck no, I was just waiting to see what all the others had to say. HA, again!  Smiley

Yes, great pictures, April, and good eye to spy that little piece!
So it's from the Wake county quarry on Capital near Wake Forest. I could not find a list of minerals found from that specific quarry, but there is a list of minerals found in Wake County on MinDat.
There is no Chrysocolla listed for Wake county. You would need a copper deposit nearby for Chrysocolla to form and I don't know if there is a copper deposit in Wake? There are copper deposits in neighboring counties, but not Wake.
Years ago on a TarHeel Club fieldtrip to that quarry we found small crystals of what we are calling Apatite that exact color. So blue Apatite would be my first guess. From your excellent pictures I see a few things that have the shape of those crystals, but some of the blue looks like it has stained a white mineral, Quartz, feldspar, calcite? These white minerals can be colored by other minerals close by. Some of the black lines in the quartz could be something like thin layers of Ilmenite instead of all biotite. Ilmenite can create blue included quartz?
Keep looking for the piece with all the answers!  Smiley

Here's a link to the fieldtrip report. You will find we were asking many of the same questions.
http://rockhoundlounge.com/cgi-bin/yabb252/YaBB.pl?num=1416662576
« Last Edit: Feb 9th, 2023 at 3:28pm by JoeM »  
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Scott LaBorde
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Re: Gravel Find
Reply #3 - Feb 10th, 2023 at 3:00pm
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Very interesting find you have there.  If indeed it came from the Wake forest quarry, you may potentially have Carbonate-rich Fluorapatite since we know apatite can be found there. Another name that seems to pop up around the same mineral is Staffelite. Type any of those names into Google and click on images and you'll find the same sort of botryoidal blue formations like your specimen. I'm not 100% confident on this but at least it's something to consider. Good eye on finding that one.   Cheesy
  

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