Photo by Agate Lady from http://agatelady.blogspot.com/2009/06/rain-flower-agates.html
Chinese rain flower agates are found in Nanijing, China in the bed of the Yangtze River. They can also be called Yuhashi or Yuhua stones. The river polishes them smooth, and people often display them in a small bowl of water to bring out the colors. They look very similar to Lake Superior agates, and like Lake Superior agates, they are named after where they came from.
A landscape agate is any agate with inclusions that appear to be a landscape scene. This usually includes plumes or dendrites, because they look so much like trees. I was unable to find the original sources for some of these cabochons, but I think the beautiful photos speak for themselves. Which one is your favorite?
Photo by Verity Woolf, from collection of Jo Woolf. Retrieved from: http://the-hazel-tree.com/2014/01/06/enhydro-agate-a-secret-water-chamber/
Sometimes, agates will have a little bubble of water trapped inside. This is called an enhydro. The water inside is millions of years old! The water can be seen if you shine a light on the agate from behind, or heard if you shake it. Eventually, the water will work its way out and evaporate via small capillaries, but the hollow part will still remain. It is also possible that water could enter the agate through the same capillaries. Enhydros can be found in watery places where agates are found, such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Oregon. Photos don’t show this very well, but on the link in the photo, the owner has some videos that show off the water inside.
For more information about enhydros, go here: http://www.rocksinmyheadtoo.com/Enhydros.htm
From the collection of Dennis Tryon. http://www.mindat.org/photo-374385.html
Brecciated agate is a naturally amalgamated matrix of broken agate fragments. In other words, it’s broken agates stuck together to make one big agate. Sometimes it’s called mosaic agate or ruin agate.
Photo by Edward Allen Gems at http://edwardallengems.com/slabs-stone_canyon.php
Jasper and agates are both a type of quartz known as chalcedony. So it makes perfect sense that sometimes you can find jasper and agate melded together, like so. Agates are usually transparent or translucent, and jasper is usually opaque, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Sometimes it’s very difficult to tell the difference between agate and jasper, in which case people may call it chalcedony, agate jasper, or jaspagate. It is mostly found in the American Southwest and California, like other agates and chalcedonies. The one pictured was found near the San Andreas Fault.
Photo by Pat McMahan from http://www.agateswithinclusions.com/images/US/ore/Priday_Ranch_Plume6.jpg
The thunder egg was declared the official state rock of Oregon in 1965, because there are quite a lot of them there. A thunder egg is a rounded nodule or geode with agate in the center. Thunder eggs can also contain quartz, chalcedony, crystals, or opal. The inside parts can be opaque or transparent – there are almost as many possible designs as there are agates. This unusual thunder egg shown above is from Oregon and has plume inclusions. Some thunder eggs are also geodes but this one is not a geode because it does not have crystal points. A more typical thunder egg would look similar, but with bands or a single color on the inner part.
Photo by David J. Eicher, http://www.mindat.org/photo-378407.html
It’s pretty hard not to notice that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Everything is awash in pink here, even the fountains. So, I thought I would highlight an interesting pink mineral. Thulite is a a pink variety of zoisite, a crystal, and it’s pink because it contains manganese. Thulite is named after Thule, which was the ancient name for Norway (or sometimes when talking about far-off places in general, like when Virgil wrote about “Ultima Thule”). It is most often found in Norway, Scandinavia, and sometimes North Carolina. Susan G. Komen estimates that 232,030 cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, so now that you’ve read this, go do your breast self-exam!
Specimen from the National Mineral Collection, photo by Chip Clark. http://geogallery.si.edu/index.php/en/1177807/agate
Iris agates are very finely banded (15-30 bands per millimeter) iridescent agates that I like to call CD agates. In order to see if an agate has the iris effect, you must bring it home, cut off a thin slice, and hold it up to the light. The slices also have to be cut perpendicular to the banding to see the rainbows. The rainbow effect occurs because the thin layers of agate split up the visible light into many beams of different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors. This is also known as a diffraction grating, and it’s also the reason why CDs have rainbow patterns.
If you would like a technical explanation of how iris agates act as diffraction gratings read this: http://www.minsocam.org/msa/collectors_corner/arc/iris.htm
This unique agate was found in Malheur County, Oregon. It has a scale-like layer that resembles the skin of a snake.
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.
Show-Me Rockhounds Kansas City 
