Michigan Rocks & Minerals: A Field Guide to the Great Lake State (Rocks & Minerals Identification Guides) - Softcover

Lynch, Dan R.; Lynch, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1591932394 ISBN 13: 9781591932390

Publisher: Adventure Publications, 2010

Synopsis

Get this must-have guide for Michigan, featuring full-color photographs and information to help you identify rocks and minerals.

Identify and collect rocks and minerals with the perfect guide to the Great Lake State! With this famous field guide by Dan R. Lynch and Bob Lynch, field identification is simple and informative. The book features comprehensive entries for 96 rocks and minerals, from common rocks to rare finds. That means you’re more likely to identify what you’ve found. The authors know rocks and took their own full-color photographs to depict the detail needed for identification―no more guessing from line drawings. The field guide’s easy-to-use format helps you to quickly find what you need to know and where to look.

Inside you’ll find:

• 96 specimens: Only Michigan rocks and minerals
• Quick Identification Guide: Identify rocks and minerals by color and common characteristics
• Range/occurrence maps: See where each specimen is commonly found
• Professional photos: Crisp, stunning images

Michigan Rocks & Minerals includes beautiful photography, relevant information, and the authors’ expert insights. With this book 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 and very hard crystals, veins, pockets, or pebbles

Size: Quartz can be found in a large range of sizes; as masses larger than a basketball or crystal points smaller than a pea

Color: Colorless to white, brown to red, purple

Occurrence: Very common

Notes: Quartz is the single most abundant mineral on the planet, so every rock collector, amateur or professional, should know both how to identify it and the forms it takes. Quartz consists of silicon and oxygen, otherwise known as silica, which is colorless or white when pure, but it can take on a rainbow of colors depending on impurities. Well-formed quartz crystals, commonly called “rock crystals,” are six-sided and are found in cavities within rock. Quartz also commonly fills vesicles (gas bubbles) and cracks within rocks, appearing as pockets or veins. Beach-worn quartz masses are found as translucent white, round pebbles. Quartz is also one of the primary ingredients in rhyolite and granite, which makes those rocks very hard and weather-resistant. The identifying features of quartz are very important to know. Aside from its very high hardness and six-sided crystal points, quartz has a glassy luster and conchoidal fracture, which means that when struck or broken, quartz cracks or breaks in a rounded, half-moon shape. All quartz-based minerals will exhibit this fracture. Finally, quartz will produce a spark when struck with a metal object.

Where to Look: Quartz specimens are easily picked up on the Keweenaw’s lakeshore and in copper mine dumps.

Edition details

• Publisher: Adventure Publications
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591932394
• ISBN 13: 9781591932390
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256