Eye Agates

An eye agate is an agate that is marked with one or more concentric circles, which look like eyes. The circles are usually a complementary color to the rest of the agate. The eyes are actually little spheres, possibly caused by silicification around a seed crystal of some other material located at the edge of the agate while the rest of the agate is forming. They just look circular because you see their cross-section. Sometimes two eyes will merge, creating a figure-8 inside the stone, as seen in the close-up photo.  Eye agates are pretty rare, but they seem to occur more often in agates from Lake Superior and carnelian agates from Botswana.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s