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(*Note: All photos are CC. As always, if I took the picture, feel free to re-purpose it to your own ends. Credit is nice but hardly necessary)
So of course I'm playing with my new digital microscope and you have to bear the burden of my findings. Below, a perfectly shaped minute quartz point. Sure looks like a diamond, but it probably isn't.
That said, if you looked at the previous pebbles I posted, there's a big grey area...lots of things you can say definitely aren't, but there's a few I'm unsure about.
Read more: More Pictures of pebbles, quartz, ballas diamonds, etc.
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Now, playing again with the digital camera and some hydrochloric acid, I've put some of the previously photographed "pebbles" (more grit and grains of sand) in the HCL solution to see which dissolve and which survive. Those that survive - intact - are presumably diamonds...
This is the starting photograph:
You can see the bubbles as the HCL works it's magic. I spilled a bit, always, hopefully the desk and computer are here in the morning, but a time-lapse animation/.gif/vine will help to show me where to steer my attentions...In the past, I never knew which ones "survived" and which ones merely shrunk, and needed more acid to disappear. Now I'll know...
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Check around the visible coal seams in Drumheller, Starland County, anywhere in Alberta really, and you'll probably find some Alberta Amber. Generally small pieces, the size of a pea or smaller, it's brittle and readily crumbles (so you have to be careful), but it does show some beautiful colors...
It could be heated, pressed, sealed in resin to make some interesting jewelry and rings (they do this to the lower grade Baltic amber), but Alberta classes it as a fossil and so collecting is forbidden. Shame. If it were coal, or oil and gas, or simply in coal, you could collect all you wanted and burn it, no problem, but the collecting of it to appreciate is prohibited by law.
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And, newly arrived from China a digital USB microscope, so I can share with you the infinitude of minute maybe-probably-not-diamonds...
On the right side, clear with some points with bits of river-washed quartz. For reference, the grid is 5 mm square, the stone would measure approximately 1mm X 1mm. Truly an engagement-class stone...