My favourite set of minerals

Having taken some pictures about minerals one month ago I decided to post this little set of minerals that look like pretty good, they are hand samples with a variety of minerals. Due to I am not the best mineralogist, I did my best attempt to recognize and show them for sharing. The following ten samples have a nice view for well.

Pyrrhotite and quartz (as fragments)

Sphalerite (the coin has 2 centimeters of diameter)

Crisocole (the colour blueish green is too obvious, besides the hardness)

Tourmaline / Schorlo (the white streak, hardness, colour and habit are very characteristic)

Malaquite (the colour is green apple or darker not similar with crisocole)

Crisocole, it shows a low hardness (you could scratch with a clip), isn't it?

Magnetite

Plagioclase into andesite

Arsenopyrite, calcopyrite and quartz

Until the next post!

Walking below the rain at Huancayo

The last weekend, I and some friends of mine  spent some of our time for visiting Huancayo, as well as taking a tour, we were walking and checking the sedimentary deposits around the main city, through Miluchaca, Torre Torre and Miraflores. Of course, it was a great walk.

One of the most visited places from Huancayo is Torre Torre, where we checked some sedimentary deposits of debris flow and sheet flood composed basically of mud and stratified gravel, due to erosion, many of these deposits get shaped as “torres” which translation to english is “tower” so that is the reason why this place calls Torre Torre.

Into each sedimentary facies there are some special features to pay attention, specially when you may watch carefully an erosive surface upwards the following picture, besides you will see lens of stratified gravel with some imbrication:

The next picture begins in Miluchaca, towards south-east from Huancayo, my two friends and me were trying to take a walk below the recent raindrops over us, logically we were trying to walk to the upper part of the ground.

These deposits seem to be very similar to the ones observed at Torre Torre composed basically of erosive debris flow (gravel) and sheet-flood deposits (mud and stratified gravel ):

Pals making some stratigraphic logs:

A large hill in front of me is telling me that is the same kind of land where I am sitting on (as a huge lobe of mud and gravel too)…

An awesome view of Miluchaca with a whole set of trees.

Another huge lobe of mud and gravel in Huayucachi reported as a sedimentary deposit belongs to Quaternary:

Quartzites and phyllites which are reported as Excelsior Group (Precambrian):

A little fold (anticline) at rocks from Excelsior Group:

A zoomed view from the latter picture:

A cross-bedding in sandstones:

A nice view…

The drainage allows us and open the land for seeing the real nature of the sedimentary surface where we were walking on:

Here, you could see the contact between the rock mass and the sedimentary deposit around it towards to the right side (where the green vegetation is growing):

A tipic house in the highlands…it makes me remember my childhood and that is the reason why we walked on and took this little journey.

Until the next field trip!

A new extra geoblog

Making a blog, specially one just about geology is not such an easy thing. Hundreds of times trying to check out how your “digital house” could have an outstanding view or whether the images are at high quality are stuffs which involves a great matter of time and responsability.

Beyond of it, this time I have arranged some of that time for making a new geoblog and little by little going building this new web place for geologists and people not relationed in this science. For all the rest, this new space and my other geoblog in spanish, Explorock, will both grow, almost, together.

See you later, in a new post about geology. Thanks