Shawn Wallace, Applications Engineer, EDAX.

One of the perks of both my degree (Geology) and my current job is that I have travelled extensively. In all those travels, I had been to 47 of the 48 contiguous US States, with Maine being the missing one. This year, I decided to be selfish and dragged the family to Maine on vacation, so I that could tick off the final one.

Being a member of the Wallace family means vacation is a time for strenuous hikes and beating on rocks to unlock their inner goodies, to add to our ever growing rock and mineral collection. This vacation was no different. Maine is home to some of the best studied and known Pegmatites, and they quickly became our goal. Pegmatites are neat for a several reasons, the main two being that they tend to form giant crystals (a 19 foot long Beryl found in Maine) and weird minerals in general tend to form in them.

I was able to track down some publicly accessible sites, found a lovely home base to rent for the week, and we set off for a week long rockhounding adventure. Ok not all week. We took a couple days off to go swimming, as it got up over 90F (>32C).

Figure 1. Dendrites cover this massive feldspar sample on nearly all faces.

Our first stops yielded the usual kind of rocks I was expecting, but another site did not. There we found dendrites everywhere. The rock itself is a massive feldspar (Fig. 1). You can see that most of the dendrites nucleate at the edge of a fracture surface and then do their fractal thing on the surface itself. Wanting to better understand the sample, I started searching for previous EBSD work on geological dendrites. While a lot exists in the metals world, very little exists in the geological world. To me, this means I have work to do. Let’s see what I can do to get some useful data on this sample!

P.S. I have Alaska and Hawaii to go. Who needs an onsite training in those states? 😉