It’s been a few days since my last fossick at Gemstone Beach. On Friday and Saturday, I had visited a beach closer to where I was staying. On Sunday, it was cold and wet and windy so I stayed inside. I decided to be brave and venture out today. In the morning, it was cold and wet and windy but the weather forecast looked promising for the afternoon – I use a weather forecaster called “Yr.no” and it provides hour by hour forecasting that I generally find very useful. “Yr.no” is a popular, publicly-funded Norwegian weather service that provides surprisingly detailed weather forecasts worldwide through its website and mobile app.”Yr” means drizzle in Norwegian. The service is jointly produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
I arrived at Gemstone Beach at 11.40am – it was an outgoing tide with low tide due at 2.00pm. The temperature was only six degrees, but at least the rain stopped when I arrived. Initially there was very little wind but halfway through my fossick, , a bitterly cold breeze sprung up, stinging any exposed skin. Despite the dark day, one carload of what was probably a Mum and Dad with a young child were there when I pulled up, and even more people arrived after that. The Taunoa Stream was running too high and fast to cross, due to the rain over the last day and a half, so I spent just over an hour fossicking back and forth a couple of times on the beach in front of carpark. The temperature had risen to nine degrees when I left at 1pm. I found one small but kind of different poppy jasper and only one small hydrogrossular garnet but a number of interesting looking stones.
The small poppy jasper I found today was interesting because the orbs were spaced apart, not crowded together as is more usual:
An intense green stone with lots of little bits in it:
The purple hues and white shapes in this stone caught my eye:
I like the dark stones with white crystals or spots. In the first side of this stone, the regular white spots are interrupted, are smaller and fainter:
I have found lots and lots of breccia stones on Gemstone Beach, where the fragments (“clasts) in the stone are angular (see this Post from September last year, for example). Conglomerates contain rounded fragments, and I have been looking for specimens without success until maybe today. The larger fragments in this stone are rounded, although some the tiny fragments are angular:
Sometimes a stone may not be purely a breccia or conglomerate but may contain both angular and rounded clasts. I’ve been trying to think of a good name for such but have not yet thought up one.
A partly brecciated stone, with tiny angular fragments:
I picked up this trace fossil stone because of the way some of the traces seemed to radiate from a central point, an unusual pattern:
Normally I tend to collect protovirgularia traces – lines of chevrons – but there are a wide range of other types of traces. A well-illustrated account of the different types of trace fossils can be found in this Sedimentary Geology textbook.
I have yet to turn my mind to the range of types of traces in the Gemstone Beach stones.
Seven other of my finds today, a wide range of colours:
The next Post in this Series describes a visit to Bluecliffs Beach, further west on the coast of Te Waewae Bay. An Index to the Series is here.
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