Smoky quartz
Smoky or smokey quartz is a brown to black variety of quartz.[1] Like other quartz gems, it is a silicon dioxide crystal. The smoky colour results from free silicon, formed from the silicon dioxide by natural irradiation.
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[edit] Varieties
[edit] Morion
A very dark brown to black opaque variety is known as morion. Morion is the German, Danish, Spanish and Polish synonym for smoky quartz.[2] The name is from a misreading of mormorion in Pliny the Elder.[3]
[edit] Cairngorm
Cairngorm is a variety of smoky quartz crystal found in the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. It usually has a smokey yellow-brown colour, though some specimens are a grey-brown.
It is used in Scottish jewellery and as a decoration on kilt pins and the handles of sgian dubhs (anglicised: skean dhu). The largest known cairngorm crystal is a 23.6 kg (52 pound) specimen kept at Braemar Castle.
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Another example of smoky quartz
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Smoky quartz found in a stream
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- ^ Smoky Quartz on Mindat
- ^ http://www.mindat.org/min-6270.html Morion on Mindat
- ^ New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd ed., 2005), p. 1102.
- Holden, Edward (1925). "The Cause of Color in Smoky Quartz and Amethyst" in American Mineralologist, vol. 9, pp. 203-252
[edit] External links
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