The Formation of Thundereggs

by

Robert Colburn

, aka "Paul, the Geode Kid"

Available NOW on CD-ROM, Mac and PC

A complete theory on the formation and filling of thundereggs.

Please contact us for further information .



The Formation of Thundereggs

(Lithophysae)

Granite and the Genesis of Rhyolite and Perlite Insolubility,

and a Mechanism for the Formation of Star-Shaped Gas Pockets in Lithophysae

Introduction

This theory on the genesis of thundereggs, or what is called in geology lithophysae (singular, lithophysa), has been developed from over 45 years of prospecting, digging, and observation in the field in over 100 locations in California, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. At rock and gem shows, I have used my meager "silver pick" to obtain specimens from the state of Colorado, several locations in Mexico, and one each from Germany, France, and Queensland, Australia. An aside which will be discussed later is the apparent paucity of thunderegg agates available from locations in the world outside the North American continent in general, and the Basin and Range Province in particular. In spite of the tonnages of vein and amygdaloidal agates from everywhere else in the world that have flooded the American market for decades, e.g.: Brazil, India, Uruguay, and Africa, as well as Montana's glaciated amygdaloids and the famous "coconuts" from Mexico, very few good thundereggs have appeared on the market.

I have been interested in rocks since I was about ten. The first thunderegg I owned was a polished quarter-end piece from the Priday Blue Beds in North Central Oregon that I had traded for a sea shell from a friend. Though today I remember it as a rock shop "second," its white flat banded center contrasted by an encircling rich blue banded layer, with a star-shaped exterior encased in the familiar orangish-brown rhyolite matrix- even the name- captivated me.

At about the same time, I joined the East Bay Mineral Society and went on my first field trip to dig the locally popular Berkeley Hills Blue Agates. These are amygdaloids found in a basaltic andesite exposed near and at the summit of the north-south-trending ridge which rises from about 1500 to 2000 feet, forming the main core of the range high above the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area. These agates have been dug from the exposed edge of this flow for about two miles in a zone only about four feet wide. At places, some exquisite iris agates are found.

I met two fine gentlemen on this and subsequent field trips. They, along with my first thunderegg, were to seal my fate. One was a teacher at the California College of Arts and Crafts: He took an interest in my enthusiasm for rocks. He let me use the diamond lapidary saw in the jewelry classroom after classes all I wanted, in exchange for a small amount that I cut. The other was Calvin Ferrar, then in his eighties, a man who had collected thundereggs from a dozen places in Oregon and California: It was from him that I learned that thundereggs came from more places than the Priday Ranch. I also discovered that each location produced a distinctly different textured and colored rhyolite shell, and that the agate interiors were as different as well. I was astonished at the variety of thundereggs Calvin had. He sold rocks and jewelry he made right out of his home. I bought thundereggs from him and he let me cut and polish them, and that is how I started my collection. He showed me how to cut a Priday egg right-side up, so that the flat-layered "waterline" agate and/or quartz crystals would be in the order in which they were deposited.

The Priday Ranch thundereggs are structurally uniform in the several adjacent deposits. They are round to egg-shaped, with raised ridges, two of which encircle the top and bottom like the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn that encircle the Earth, and four or five longitudinal ridges that intersect these latitudinal lines. If cut perpendicularly through the two latitudinal ridges, the result is a four-pointed star, positioned so that the sequences of agate deposition are in correct chronological order. In the rarer five-longitudinally-ridged eggs, I learned that cutting through those lines yielded a five-pointed traditional star. While sacrificing a little accuracy, the idealized star enhanced marketability for the tourist as well as the collector.

Calvin advertized in rock and gem magazines to sell his wares, as well as my Berkeley Hills iris agate slabs. As a result of advertising, he had occasional visits from dealers who mined, traveled and sold rough rocks, usually by 100 pound gunny sacks full. Occasionally, one of these "agate miners" would bring in thundereggs from a new location. Calvin was alert to my method of collecting and would chance a purchase in which I would buy, cut, and add the best from each new location to my collection.

By the time I was 15, I had to go to Oregon, which I had envisioned as a mysterious paradise with countless mother-lodes of thundereggs. But I had no car. Previously, I had hitchhiked to rock and mineral locations within 100 miles of my home in Oakland, using a 1948 publication on rock and mineral locations by the California Division of Mines. But to hitchhike to Oregon? Six or seven hundred miles?! I had hopped freight trains from San Jose to Oakland after visiting Almaden and Guadelupe Quicksilver Mines of world fame. But to Oregon? I had to do it!

I was 16 in the summer of 1952. I was transfixed while I sat in the open doorway of a box car watching the scenic splendor of the Siskiyou Mountains go by. Whether I got any thundereggs or not, wanderlust from the novelty of seeing strange beautiful new places I had never seen before had me planning new excursions before I even knew what success this first venture would yield.

After leaving the freight train in Bend, Oregon, I hitched a ride to Madras, a small town just 17 miles from my first destination. I went to a rock shop there for information on how to get to the Priday thunderegg beds. The owner was impressed with what he saw, a boy with an obsession: There I stood, with a black leather suitcase, just telling this man that I had traveled in said manner, over 600 miles from Oakland, California "... to dig some thundereggs?!" After talking awhile, he said he would take me to the diggings the next morning. He let me shower and put me up for the night.

I had always thought Oregon was all a carpet of forests, but once one leaves the Cascade Mountains going east, the state is mostly juniper and sagebrush desert with only islands of forests at some places above 5,000 feet. We arrived at the Priday Blue Beds at opening time. It was, and is still today, a commercial operation where you pay a charge per pound for what you dig. By 1952, a small bulldozer was required to remove tailings that built up behind a four foot ledge from time to time as digging progressed. The thundereggs were concentrated in a moist, ash-like layer about 18 inches thick, and what surprised me, a 2-to-3 foot thick layer on top of what looked like obsidian.

My new friend, familiar with a little geology, called it a sheet flow of perlite lava. Having read about some speculation that thundereggs were volcanic bombs that dropped into volcanic ash, then filled with agate, piqued my curiosity when I started digging. I found that the nodules were not only in the "ash" layer, but the top of the underlying rhyolite was composed of a solid mass of thundereggs that seemed to become more sparse as they rose upward into clusters stuck together. More singles occurred as one dug higher into the ashy-clay layer. More astonishing was the fact that some of these "bombs" had managed to get up into the perlite sheet flow and become entirely encased by it.



Figure 0.01

Strata as exposed by strip mining at the Priday Blue Bed at Richardson's Recreational Ranch, Madras, Oregon: A). Top soil. B). Perlite breccia and pumiceous zone (top of flow complex). C). Black glassy perlite with lithophysae containing fills of about 50/50 "waterline" agate layers over white opal layers. D). Transitional zone gradational downward from black glassy through gray partially altered perlite to the completely altered clay at E), where most of the best thundereggs are found. F). is the rhyolite bedrock composed of a solid mass of eggs. G). The eggs grade downward to empty box-shaped holes to point H), where solid rhyolite rests conformably on ash layers, I).

Being familiar with how destructive hot lava can be to quartz, as exhibited by California's famous Lake County "Diamonds," I couldn't understand how agate-filled "bombs" could be picked by a hot lava flow and survive completely unaltered, especially when most of the thundereggs I broke out of the perlite were filled in half with opal. Any seasoned gem maker knows opal can stand far less heat than agate and quartz.

The reason for this is that, though like agate and quartz crystals being a silica (SiO 2 ) precipitate, opal is a hydrated form, that is, it has water in its molecular structure, hence must be cut and polished wet. And just as interesting is the "floor" of this thunderegg bed- its make-up being of a solid mass of eggs cemented to and included within the rhyolite itself!

At the edge of the bed next to the erosional downfall, the dozer had broke off a large chunk of the rhyolite bedrock, exposing the gradation and depth into which the eggs existed. All of the eggs that I later cut that came from the perlite and the underlying "ashy" layer were filled solid, except for three. Those had small half-inch hollow pockets lined with druzy euhedral quartz crystals. Two had their pockets centered inside half-inch tree ring-like layers of dark blue spherulitically crystalline chalcedony, known popularly as fortification agate. The third had its pocket nearer the upper edge, with the agate bands encircling it trailing off and thinning out at the top ridge that encompasses the egg; this chamber was barely cut into, which was unfortunate because it contained water which dribbled out when shaken. Had I gotten lucky, I would have had an enhydro- an agate with a visible bubble moving around when tilted. But such luck is rare.

Now, on the bedrock in contact with the ashy-clay, some eggs could be pried off whole, with more melded into doubles, triples or clusters. Most broke apart revealing a hollow top consisting of a thin layer of chalcedony coating the walls of the egg's interior. Horizontally banded "waterline agate" is contained within the thin concentric layer and occupying from one quarter to one half of the interior at bottom, with the tops being flat floors, some with chalky surfaces that can be scraped with a fingernail. And in all, the floors are all horizontal equally with every other egg in the bed, including being horizontal with all the waterline agate and opal found in the two layers above. Also very interesting, is that all of the floors and layers are horizontal to the sheet flows of the Priday Blue Bed itself!

As I was to discover years later, a geologist studying perlite in New Mexico used such floors when considering fault tilting of strata: "The nearly horizontal attitude of the flat upper surface of the white opal in the larger vesicles provides an excellent indicator of the slight degree of tilting that has affected the lower rhyolite in its post-vesicle-filling history" (Robert H. Weber, 1957, Circular 44: "Geology and Petrology of the Stendel Perlite Deposit, Socorro County, New Mexico," page 6).

Figure 0.02

Geologic Map of the Stendel Perlite Deposit, Socorro, NM

Some of these hollow eggs contain worm-like stalactitic growths, many extending into the voids in all directions, in defiance of gravity. Some extend down into the waterline agate layers. The "stalactites" contain a thread of some opaque mineral that must have grown out into the interior first, because they are all contained within the thin, transparent chalcedony that coats the walls of most of the thundereggs in this bed. The vertical, as well as the wandering stalactites appear as eyes and tubes, or as "moss agate" in some of the eggs in the upper layers. It was getting late, so I decided to go see how deep the eggs existed in a chunk of the rhyolite bedrock kicked up by the dozer. From about several inches to a foot down, the individuality of the thundereggs became lost and less infiltrated with chalcedony, to a point where there was nothing but hundreds of closely packed star-shaped holes in a mass of fine-grained brown rhyolite. In the lengthening sunlight, a broken piece revealed a radial structure from the center of each wall of the cavities. It is as though the silica had not been able to permeate the solid rhyolite to fill the pockets.

Figure 0.03

Drawing of rhyolite flow rock dislodged by a bulldozer at Priday Ranch agate bed.

A1). Magnified view of lithophysae from "floor," A2), of the Priday Blue Bed, Madras, Oregon. Arrows x, y, and z are the opaline, often chalky floors, always horizontal to all bedding in the area, indicating little or no "post-vesicle" filling deformation. B). Transition zone, from the highly silicified lithophysaic zone with spherulitic texture and half-filled lithophysae, to B), less altered rhyolite with almost empty lithophysae, to C), where the spherulitic texture diminishes until the lithophysal identity of the shells is lost. From C) to D), the vesicles diminish in size and geometry until extinction into the host rhyolite, E), which rests conformably on the rhyolitic ash and/or ash flow tuffs of the John Day Formation at F).

The radial, fibrous structure on the pocket walls were familiar to me at that time as existing on the surface of weathered agate cores (Figure 0.04) collected on the slopes below the erosional surface at the edge of this bed. The shape of these cores are six sided, with a rare seventh face on the side which would account for the rare five-point star when a five-longitudinally-ridged egg is cut to achieve that shape. It is obvious that the edges of the faces correspond to the ridges on the surface of these eggs, and on eggs from other locations as well (which will be discussed later). Each face is depressed inward to the center. A fibrous structure cast on the agate cores radiates from the center of each face towards the edges.

Figure 0.04

Thunderegg cores

1). A thunderegg core with its rhyolite shell weathered off, showing the "button" on the top and its corresponding dimple at the bottom.

2). Side view: All the core's faces are indented towards the center from which a fibrous radial structure projects. All structures on the core surface have been cast from the original lithophysal cavity. The first cut, bottom, is the core cut in half, the second cut is laid open. Both cuts show indented faces.

The top and bottom faces of the cores have, on one face, a dimple at its center, and the other, a "button" embossed at the center of its face (See Figure 0.04). When whole eggs are cut through those centers, they show the button to be a round "spherulite" in the shell which is porous, unlike the "silicified" rhyolite surrounding it. These spherulites are light brown to white, often tinged olive green. At the opposite is a depression in the shell (which would represent the button on agate cores), some of which have material similar in looks to that in the spherulite, surrounding the depression in the rhyolite.

Figure 0.05

Exterior of the top and bottom of an agate core from a lithophysae cut in half. The shell has been completely weathered off.

Figure 0.06

Two specimens cut "right side up" from two different deposits showing the familiar "button" at the center bottom of both, and the corresponding depression at the top, into which the two opposite features fit before expanding gases opened up cavities, forcing them apart (arrows). The specimen on left is from Priday and the other is a "biconic" core egg from the Frieda mine, 13 miles south of Maupin, Oregon in the Deschutes Canyon.

The sizes of these features in the Blue Bed are from one quarter inch to one half inch. Most Priday Blue Thundereggs are oval-shaped, ranging from two to four inches in diameter. The button and depression on the top and bottom, not always respectively, is highly suggestive that these two opposite faces were once common together and had been forced or drawn apart (both of which we shall discover later).

I must have seemed like a ten year old kid to my rockshop friend, for I had so many questions about thundereggs and what I had seen in the field. He said he had heard of some theory about a rhyolite-mud, in which steam was trapped- and when the mud dried, it shrank, pulling apart into a star-like cavity, like the Utah septarian geodes do. But, I asked, why didn't the heat from the perlite flow destroy those that it came into contact with? This seemed to perplex him, for he tried to divert the line of questions by pointing out other locations to dig at.

I wanted to ask him if the rhyolite flow below where the eggs seemed to come from, was a mud flow. And how did they get up into the ash and perlite layers? Did all of these lavas and ash come out at the same time? This last question was to lead to a solution on how thundereggs made of the same rhyolitic composition could be found in three disparate-appearing strata, but not until over thirty years later. And it was from the same geologist quoted above, in the same circular on the Stendel Perlite, that the perlite and underlying rhyolite, with its spherulitic (thunderegg) zone on the contact, came from the same melt, extruded concurrently with the two separating almost completely, but containing a mineral and textural composition so as to indicate a genetic relationship:

"The cogenesis of the perlite and the rhyolite is demonstrated by their nearly identical chemical composition (water-free basis), phenocryst assemblage, and intimate to gradational contact relationships" (Weber, 1957). Cogenesis means "made from the same" (See Table 0.01). Phenocrysts are the small crystals seen in some rhyolites, usually the more viscous, thicker flows than in the lower viscosity thin sheet flows like the rhyolite at the Priday Blue Beds.

Table 0.01

CHEMICAL ANALYSES, NORMS, AND MODES OF LOWER RHYOLITE,

PERLITE, AND ALTERED PERLITE.*

272-P19 Lower Rhyolite (Tr 1 ) 272-P51d Perlite (Tp) 272-P52a Altered Perlite

Natural Recalculated to Anhydrous Natural Recalculated to Anhydrous Natural Recalculated to Anhydrous SiO 2 74.04% Al 2 O 3 13.35 Fe 2 O 3 1.01 FeO 0.24 MnO 0.04 MgO 0.18 CaO 0.95 Na 2 O 2.88 K 2 O 5.15 TiO 2 0.12 P 2 O 5 0.04 H 2 O+ 0.59 H 2 O- 0.14 CO 2 n.d. S n.d. Total 99.73% 75.79% 13.49 1.02 0.24 0.04 0.18 0.96 2.92 5.20 0.12 0.04 0.00 0.00



100.00% 73.10% 12.50 0.48 0.42 0.04 0.22 1.03 2.99 4.76 0.09 0.03 3.70 0.36 n.d. n.d. 99.72% 76.42% 13.07 0.50 0.44 0.04 0.23 1.08 3.12 4.98 0.09 0.03 0.00 0.00



100.00% 67.65% 11.85 1.18 0.15 0.04 1.03 2.82 0.99 3.34 0.17 0.10 7.13 3.75 0.00 0.03 100.23% 75.78% 13.27 1.25 0.17 0.04 1.15 3.16 1.11 3.74 0.19 0.11 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00%

NORMS MODES

Minerals 272-P19 272-P51d Minerals 272-P19 272-P51d Quartz Orthoclase Albite Anorthite Corundum Enstatite Ferrosilite Magnetite Hematite Ilmenite Total 36.51% 30.90 24.80 4.77 1.24 0.51 - 0.47 0.65 0.15 100.00% 36.78% 29.58 26.33 5.62 0.53 - 0.27 0.73 - 0.16 100.00% Quartz Sanidine Oligoclase (Ab 70-81 ) Biotite Hornblende Magnetite Matrix

Total 6.34% 1.35 8.38

1.34 0.52 0.16 82.80

100.00% 5.43% 4.05 3.66

0.53 0.31 trace 86.02

100.00%

*H. B. Wiik, analyst; norms by M. S. Sun.

The higher fluidity of some rhyolites indicates a hotter temperature at extrusion and/or varying chemical compositions. It is possible that lower temperature, high viscosity rhyolite domes and flows contain some crystals while molten, but others may have had time to crystalize in the slower cooling thick flows.

In the thinner flows like those at Priday, the quick cooling did not allow for larger crystals to grow and/or crystals were absent at extrusion, melted and mixed by higher temperatures to begin with. Unlike the porphyritic (grainy) texture of the rhyolite and perlite of the Stendel Deposit in Socorro, New Mexico, the rhyolite at Priday Blue Beds is aphanitic (microcrystalline) in texture. The perlite above is also similar in texture, but it still has the glassy luster characteristic of all perlites (grainy perlites are often called vitrophyres).

The fractures of porphyritic rhyolites and perlites are ragged, the shear plane interrupted by the larger crystals in the way. At Priday, both rhyolite and perlite show more similar conchoidal fractures. Though I have not seen a chemical ratio analysis of the Priday rhyolite and perlite, I do believe the two to be cogenetic.

The larger problem now is that if the rhyolite and perlite flowed out at the same time, how did the ashy layer get in between the two, and how did the eggs get in all three units? If we recall Weber's observation on the cogenesis of the rhyolite and perlite at the Stendel Deposit, he states, "...Intimate to gradational contact relationships exist." The intimate relationship means the abrupt end of the rhyolite at contact with the perlite. But first, it is the gradational relationship that may shed light on the "ash layer" problem where it is in contact with the perlite.

In Weber's discussion of the Stendel perlite and its cogenetic rhyolite partner, he describes the alteration of the perlite in fractured zones and along spherulitic and "megaspherulite" zones (the ones containing the opal floors measuring up to five inches). In geology, spherulites containing cavities are also called lithophysae, so Weber's "megaspherulites" are thundereggs.

Now the alteration products of the perlite were found to be montmorillonite, a clay mineral complex of hydrated sodium, potassium, aluminum, and magnesium silicates. The spherulites have a radial, fibrous structure and consist of cristobalite, a high temperature, metastable form of silicon dioxide (SiO 2 ) and perthite, a potassium and sodium-aluminum silicate. The chalcedony and opal filling the "megaspherulites" are deposited from aqueous solutions, hydrothermal and surface sources, e.g. lakes, streams, and/or precipitation. As seen in the field and on the geological mapping of the Stendel Deposit, in the S.E. quarter of the S.E. quarter of section 14, and the N.E. quarter of the N.E. quarter of section 23, Township-3-South, Range-4-West, where the "spherulitic zones" are mainly located, the alteration of the perlite is greatest.

Figure 0.07

The ashy clay grades up from the rhyolite, through the spherulite and lithophysae zone going from a buff colored material to a less altered gray zone, melding into the perlite above. Though this looks like an ash or a welded tuff where silicified by meteoric solutions, its chemistry was analyzed, and it tracked very closely to the chemistry of the rhyolite and perlite so as to indicate a cogenesis of all three (Weber, 1957, Table 1). This suggests that at the Priday Blue Bed, the ash fall, or "ash-flow tuff" proclaimed by several authors (Ross, Shaub, Fabians, et al), may not necessarily be an ash or tuff. To date, a petrological chemical analysis of the Priday rhyolite, perlite, and the clay layer between has not been done.

However, a description of hand specimens is suggestive of cogenesis, revealing a gradational continuity through the three components. As noted above, there are the squarish-shaped cavities in the rhyolite below the silica, infused and spherulitically circumscribed similarly-shaped cavities which are in contact with the clay above. Immediately below and on this contact, the lithophysal cavities are stuck together on the top of the rhyolite, some of which can be pried off only in clusters, very few can be removed as singles without rupturing the shells. The cavities strictly at this layer are mostly filled about half-way with flat layered chalcedony and opal, the floors of which show little, if any, post cavity-filling deformation- that is, the floors are still parallel to the earth's surface, and also parallel with a sequence of later sheet flows visible on Pony Butte nearby to the north (See Figures 0.08 and 0.09). Above this, and in the clay, the lithophysae (thundereggs) grade upward from clusters to triples, and doubles with singles, becoming more numerous near the margin of the overlying perlite.

Figures 0.08 and 0.09

Figure 0.08 is a photo of the Priday Blue Bed Thunderegg Deposit with Pony Butte in the background.

Three strata of rhyolitic lava flows can be seen which lay conformably on ash and/or ash-flow tuffs of the John Day Formation.

Little deformation has occurred throughout the history of events affecting the perlite (black rock in picture) and the filling of the thundereggs contained therein, hence, the "waterline" agate and opal layers conform to the topography of the area.

The egg shown in Figure 0.09 below has been broken and shifted by minor faulting as shown by the off-set layers and the breccia (broken rock) mixed with decomposed perlite, fell into and filled the hollow top third and the fissure that resulted. Later, more silica was carried by meteoric waters to reseal and "agatize" the wreckage.

The placement of this specimen in the photo is as it was oriented in place in the deposit.

The clay-perlite contact is uneven and not abrupt. The crumbly, creamy tan clay grades upward near the perlite into increasingly darker shades of light to dark gray, becoming more consolidated and changing to the hard, brittle, black glassy perlite that caps this and other lithologically similar thunderegg beds miles apart in this area.

There are also thundereggs found in the perlite itself, tapering off in number to very few within two feet. A most interesting occurrence with the eggs entirely encased in the hard, black perlite is that there is a zone of cream colored decomposed perlite around each one. This substance looks like and has a soapy feel like the tanner clay below. There is about one half inch of clay around all the agate and opal filled eggs.

There are also a few "duds" in the perlite- spherulites that failed to degas and develop a cavity. There is no clay layer around these. Evidently, there was no place for the silica to migrate from the perlite when it was saturated with percolating aqueous solutions, hence the perlite about the solid rhyolite spheroids failed to decompose, and the duds remained encased in unaltered perlite. In the cavity developed eggs, the perlite has altered to a clay as though the silica had somewhere to go, or as we will see later, drawn to the cavities.

This phenomenon is well demonstrated elsewhere, especially at two famous public locations: One, the west end of the Dugway Geode Beds in Utah in the northwest quarter of T-11-S, R-12-W, and another above Rockhound State Park near Deming, New Mexico. The Dugway Beds cover a large area and at most places, the perlite is completely decomposed. At the western area of the diggings, much of the perlite is in an original condition, black, glassy, and brittle. Around each geodic (hollow) thunderegg is a white powdery clay. The once-porous rhyolite bodies, stringers, and eggs had absorbed the silica from the surrounding perlite, becoming hard and silicified. The eggs have been partially filled with chalcedony and colloidally suspended white clay particles coating the chalcedony, followed by an overlay of relatively large, clear euhedral quartz crystals yielding a geode of white sparkling beauty prized by collectors.

At Rockhound State Park, the egg-bearing perlite is at 600 feet above the upper right parking place on a well-defined foot-path. The flow structure of this bed is not sheet-like, as it is at Priday, but is mixed with large bodies of rhyolite along with stringers, stretched torpedo-shaped lithophysae, as well as the traditionally round, agate-filled eggs, and duds. It is because the good eggs are surrounded by the yellowish-tan clay, while the duds are within only unaltered black, glassy perlite that allows the experienced digger to throw away the duds and take only the good down the steep, treacherous trail. The perlite at Rockhound Park is quite thick. I have dug downwards over twelve feet, finding an area rich in eggs and the perlite mostly decomposed.

Spherulitic buttons are found in these eggs like those at Priday, but sawing through their centers is difficult because they are not as geometrically centered as those at Priday, probably due to the parent lava flowing over an uneven surface. The contorted flow structure is seen in the host rhyolite exposed along and under this bed. One other important occurrence at this locality is that the deeper one digs, the smaller the agate cores are in relation to the rhyolite shells, to a point where most of the eggs are duds, probably due to greater overburden pressure.

The western front of the Little Florida Mountains, on which Rockhound Park sits, appears to be an old fault scarp. A lake and heavy rainfall during the Ice Ages cause chunks of the mountain that contain the thundereggs to break and slide down the scarp. Two sections of a later rhyolite flow, which is horizontal over most of the mountain, can be seen from a short distance away as two upper strata tilted at about twenty degrees off from the rest of the flow capping the mountain.

This slide-tilting occurred at the time when horizontally layered waterline agate and opal were being implaced in the cavity of these eggs. When I discovered this, I found that by marking them with a black felt marker, from the top down toward the west, for right-side-up orientation before complete removal, that when cut with the mark, some will show this slide event as the upper lines of the agate at about twenty degrees tilted from the lower set of lines (See Figure 0.10). Local rock collectors call these "tiltage eggs."

Figure 0.10

A "tiltage egg" from Rockhound State Park shows an angular unconformity in the "waterline" agate and opal layers caused by an ancient landslide that took place while the layers were implaced. Note the broken shell fragments at the bottom of the opal layers and the dried mud curls on top.

This would seem to indicate the correctness of Robert Weber's use of the attitude of the opal floors in his "megaspherulites" to determine the amount of deformation, i.e., tilt of the Stendel flows after "vesicle filling" (Weber, 1957).

This last point- of a thunderegg being filled with silica bearing aqueous solutions is important in light of several others attempting to develop various theories on how thundereggs form, specifically by any other means than a gas cavity filled by silica solutions. In a hot molten silica gel accretion theory, it is instructive and necessary to quote a passage from B. M. Shaub's dissertation published in the February (and continued in the March issue) of the Lapidary Journal in 1979, page 2348, he says of all other gas-cavity based theories,

"All base their theories on the assumption that by some force, mechanism or other culminating processes of nature, large cavities were developed in the acid magmas. The cavities are in reality the only basic starting point for every theory known to the author. The interiors of gas cavities are in general very smooth. Unless deformed after formation, the cavity walls have no distortions or irregular interior surfaces. The writer has never seen rough, irregular inside walls in scoria or other rocks with gas cavities large enough for the examination of their inside cavity walls..."

Then he concludes:

"Hence it must be certain that thundereggs are not casts of gas cavities and all theories based on gas cavity filling must be completely defective..."

He goes on to state that,

"...even our renowned petrographers and mineralogists have been led astray on fruitless routes by trying to match the spherical shape of thundereggs with that of the gas cavities..."

He continues to describe his theory on thunderegg genesis which postulates an accretion of silica gel as an immiscible directly out of molten rock which then spontaneously solidifies to the entities we find today.

I must credit this gentleman with piquing my intuition and inspiring me to reevaluate and write about what I have seen in my specimens and how they occur in the field. My first reaction to this "hot gel" theory was to ask how a calcite crystal could get into such a hot environment, become encased and circumscribed with bandings of the agate. Calcite crystals cannot form in the 2000o+ Fahrenheit temperatures in the relatively low pressures of a lava flow. Such temperatures would reduce calcite to calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. I have scores of specimens with calcite crystals well inside the agate, as well as other water-based inclusions such as manganese dendrites, zeolites (sagenite) plumes and stalactitic growths. These growths, which in most cases are the first implacements in thunderegg cavities, have subsequent bandings of chalcedony and/or quartz coating and outlining these as well as every other protuberance on the cavity wall itself. This is why the radial fibrous structures are seen on weathered agate cores of thundereggs which are often mistaken for agate casts of fossils or coral, which we shall be entertained with later.

The way the thunderegg shell and cavity develop are totally different from how their contents are implaced. The agate, opal, quartz, jasper, colors, calcite and aragonite, zeolites, dendrites, plumes, bandings, and the inclusion or exclusion of any of the above depending on location, makes for a variety of complex events. So complex that while at the same time Shaub (1979, pages 2352 & 2354 in the same Lapidary Journal quoted above) maintains that thundereggs are formed in their entirety in a "closed system," but dismisses the complexities of that process for another, later study:

"The development of the complex interiors of the thundereggs is a long and varied story in itself, a story that was directly involved with the different states and composition of a solution and its crystallization in a closed system above the critical temperature as well as at a somewhat lower value. There is probably no experimental data available that would cover such large masses of material and under such varied compositions. Hence, one must exercise some geological and physical-chemical applications in deducing the probable progressive development of the interiors (a field for different ideas)."

Perhaps we can get closer to understanding thundereggs by approaching them as gas cavities filled with water-based minerals, like those of amygdaloids, an idea fairly well accepted by most geologists.

An amygdaloid is a mineral-filled gas cavity found in basalt and andesite lavas such as the well-known huge deposit of Brazilian agates. These nodules have a round to tear-drop shape, and the walls in these lavas are smooth from which amygdaloids are removed or weathered. The lavas that contain these cavities, filled or not are called amygdaloidal basalt and/or andesite. These lavas are the largest source of igneous-based agate nodules and geodes in the world. It is intuitively simpler for me to describe a silica-water based filling for gas cavities in thundereggs as well as for amygdaloids. But it only seems intuitively contrary for expanding gases to form box-like asteriated holes.

Therefore, it would be necessary to find a natural mechanism that would produce such a cavity. After doing this, all water-based solution fillings of a gas cavity would then be explained.

And now, nearly 35 years after beginning this life-long adventure by hopping on a freight-train, I offer for testing and experimentation these hypotheses and explanations of what I have seen.

Return to the Home-page of the Basin Range Volcanics Geolapidary Museum

The Basin Range Volcanics Virtual Rockshop

You can e-mail us at

geodekid@zianet.com

Phone (505) 546-4021

You can snail-mail us at

Basin Range Volcanics Geolapidary Museum

6235 Stirrup Rd SE

Deming, New Mexico 88030

