What Are The Rare Crystals In The World

What Is The Rarest Crystal On Earth?

Taaffeite. Last on the list is another rare crystals, Taaffeite also considered the most irregular crystal globally.

• Rare Crystals-Fluorite

Forget rubies, garnets, and sapphires. Fluorite could be the most colorful mineral in the world due to the enormous range of brilliant and iridescent hues that it reflects.

The curious thing is that pure fluorite rare crystals are transparent.

The color of a crystal dictat how light interacts with the chemical elements it contains and how these substances will intertwin in an ordered structure or crystal lattice.

Any impurity that reaches the fluorite lattice can alter its apparent color . For example, manganese ions make it look orange.

And structural defects within the same crystal lattice, known as color centers, have a similar effect.

The characteristic deep purple hue of fluorite occurs due to a small number of fluorine. Ions being forced out of their place in the crystal lattice by irradiation or heating.

• Rare Crystals-Selenite –

Buried under the Sierra de Naica in Chihuahua. Mexico, the Cueva de Los Cristales houses the world’s most giant rare crystals.

They get to be 11 meters long and one wide. Intersecting in the underground cavern.

” There is no place on the planet where the mineral world reveals itself with such beauty. Says Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist at the University of Granada, Spain, who has studied the crystals.

In 2007 García-Ruiz and his team figured out how the rare crystals could grow so large.

Approximately 26 million years ago, volcanic activity below the Naica mine filled the cave with hot water rich in anhydrite. A mineral that remains solid above 58°C.

As the magma cooled below, the anhydrite dissolved into the water.

Very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years, its chemical components turned into gypsum, which can take the form of rare crystals.

And those giant gypsum rare crystals are known as selenite.

• Rare Crystals-Iceand spar

Icelandic sagas from the 10th century recount the voyages of the Vikings, describing a mysterious “sun stone” that sailors used to locate the sun in the sky so they could navigate on cloudy days.

For centuries the identity of the stone was a mystery to researchers until, in 2011, researchers found Icelandic spar aboard an Elizabethan ship sunk in 1592.

It is a variety of transparent calcite, common in the Nordic regions, separating light and producing a double image (as in the photo).

That property is called birefringence. It  cause discrepancies in the cohesive forces that hold the crystal atoms together.

When light passes through calcite rare crystals, it splits into two rays. The asymmetry in the crystal structure causes them to bend differently, producing double refraction.

• Rare Crystals-Quartz

Quartz also does exciting things because of its structural asymmetries.

The stone generates a small electrical current when a quartz crystal will compress.

Pressure on the crystal surface forces the ions it contains out of position, disturbing the overall charge balance and turning the crystal into a small battery with opposite charges.

The same rules underlie the shapes and angles of many different rare crystals.

• Rare Crystals-Galena

Galena is the most common mineral rich in the lead, but what is most striking is its ability to extract music and voices from radio waves.

And that put it at the forefront of the revolutionary glass radio receivers of the early 20th century.

Galena is a semiconductor, which means it will conduct electricity under certain circumstances.

In a crystal radio receiver, a thin metallic thread will know as a “cat’s whisker” rests delicately on a galena crystal.

That combination allows current to pass in one direction but not the other way, converting the oscillating radio waves, picked up by an antenna, into an electrical signal that can  transform into sound by speakers.

• Rare Crystals-Alien Carbon Crystal

However, two new types of ultra-tough carbon rare crystals found in the Haverö meteorite surpass it in hardness.

They will discover in 2010 by researchers using a diamond paste to polish a piece of the meteorite.

Diamond is so hard because the carbon atoms it contains will arrange in a tetrahedron-shaped crystal lattice that is immensely strong.

In the Haverö, which crashed in 1971 in Finland, the researchers found crystalline carbon organized in a rhombohedral lattice, which had never seen in nature.

Conclusion

The second substance turned out to be an entirely new class of crystalline carbon described as “intermediate between graphite and diamond.”The rare crystals are so tiny that the limits of their hardness have not yet will test.

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