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Brazilian Agates Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, South America |
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Because of their adundance, the Brazilian agates are most commonly encountered
of any agates, and they had been used widely in jewelry, lapidary arts
and crafts. They came from many large deposits in Brazil and they come
in large sizes (up to 1,000 pounds!) and they are sometimes passed as "Rainbow
Agates". It is very common to see chimes, bookends, slabs, beads, carvings,
spheres, and other crafts to be made from those agates becaue of their
cheap prices. I actually wondered how the cavities in the basaltic lava
formations got so big (think of those large agates, and famous amethyst
geodes), but I suspect that the lava may have flowed over something very
wet (aquifer?) that resulted in the raising of large water vapor
bubbles throughout the lava flows to be later filled in with agate and
quartz including amethyst.
Ironically, in spite of such large quantities of agates being mined, high quality agates seem to be scarce because most agates lack lack banding, color variety, contrasting colors, interesting inclusions or "any of the above". Such low-quality agates are porous making it very easy to dye them with unnatural (UGLY in my opinion) colors or heat-treated to make them more orange at low cost. The artificially treated agates are encountered much much more frequently than natural colored ones, and sometimes it's not easy to tell whether the colors are natural or not! General people like pretty things so artificially treated agates tend to more popular (much to my dismay) than naturally colored ones do. In spite of the adundance of Brazilian Agates, top-quality naturally colored agates are hard to obtain, and what makes it even harder is that most of the best agates are exported to Asian countries especially China for carving purposes. |
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Largest agate in my collection. I just love this pattern. |