New York Rocks & Minerals: A Field Guide to the Empire State (Rocks & Minerals Identification Guides) - Softcover

Lynch, Dan R.; Lynch, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1591935245 ISBN 13: 9781591935247

Publisher: Adventure Publications, 2016

Synopsis

Your Must-Have Guide to New York’s Rocks and Minerals

Get the perfect guide to rocks and minerals of the Empire State! This book by Dan R. Lynch and Bob Lynch features comprehensive entries for 105 New York rocks and minerals, from common rocks to rare finds. Learn from the fascinating information about everything from garnets and “Herkimer diamonds” to fossils and labradorite. The easy-to-use format means you’ll quickly find what you need to know and where to look. The authors’ incredible, sharp, full-color photographs depict the detail needed for identification―no need to guess from line drawings.

With this field guide in hand, identifying and collecting is fun and informative.

About this title

About the Author:

Dan R. Lynch has a degree in graphic design with emphasis on photography from the University of Minnesota Duluth. But before his love of the arts came a passion for rocks and minerals, developed during his lifetime growing up in his parents’ rock shop in Two Harbors, Minnesota. Combining the two aspects of his life seemed a natural choice and he enjoys researching, writing about, and taking photographs of rocks and minerals. Working with his father, Bob Lynch, a respected veteran of Lake Superior’s agate-collecting community, Dan spearheads their series of rock and mineral field guides―definitive guidebooks that help amateurs “decode” the complexities of geology and mineralogy. He also takes special care to ensure that his photographs compliment the text and always represent each rock or mineral exactly as it appears in person. He currently works as a writer and photographer in Madison, Wisconsin, with his beautiful wife, Julie. Bob Lynch is a lapidary and jeweler living and working in Two Harbors, Minnesota. He has been cutting and polishing rocks and minerals since 1973, when he desired more variation in gemstones for his work with jewelry. When he moved from Douglas, Arizona, to Two Harbors in 1982, his eyes were opened to Lake Superior’s entirely new world of minerals. In 1992, Bob and his wife Nancy, whom he taught the art of jewelry making, acquired Agate City Rock Shop, a family business founded by Nancy’s grandfather, Art Rafn, in 1962. Since the shop’s revitalization, Bob has made a name for himself as a highly acclaimed agate polisher and as an expert resource for curious collectors seeking advice. Now, the two jewelers keep Agate City Rocks and Gifts open year-round and are the leading source for Lake Superior agates, with more on display and for sale than any other shop in the country.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Quartz

Hardness: 7 Streak: White

Environment: All environments

What to look for: Light-colored, translucent, glassy and very hard six-sided crystals; also found as masses, veins, and sand

Size: Crystals can be up to fist-sized; masses can be most any size

Color: Colorless to white or gray when pure, but often stained yellow to brown or red; more rarely black or pink

Occurrence: Very common

Notes: Quartz, the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, is the first mineral all new collectors should study and be able to identify as it is ubiquitous around the world, including New York. It consists entirely of silica, the silicon- and oxygen-bearing compound that contributes to the formation of hundreds of other minerals, and it is most common as a component of rocks. As such, you’ll encounter quartz most frequently as uninteresting white or gray grains or masses within coarse-grained rocks such as granite, or as the microscopic grains that make up chert. But crystals are not rare, either, and they most often take the form of elongated hexagonal (six-sided) prisms that end with a point, frequently intergrown in groups and lining cavities in rocks. Any river or beach will yield waterworn pebbles of quartz, and glacially deposited pebbles or fragments may be found in any gravelly area. Whatever its form when you find it, quartz is easy to identify due to its distinctively high hardness (it’s typically the hardest mineral you’ll find easily), its translucency, and its conchoidal fracture (when struck, the cracks that form are circular).

Where to Look: Quartz can be found virtually anywhere, especially where there is loose gravel. It’s a common find in rivers and on beaches because it’s hard enough to survive weathering.

About this edition

• Publisher: Adventure Publications
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1591935245
• ISBN 13: 9781591935247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264