cyberbully rat club

Okay so like opal is made of silicon dioxide, which is the exact same thing quartz agate and chalcedony are made of. But instead of having its molecules arranged in a nice geometric crystal lattice, opal is made of lots of lots and lots of very very tiny SPHERES of silicon dioxide. These spheres stack up as tightly as possible but because they are spheres there will always be gaps between them. When white light passes though those gaps, it diffracts as if passing through a prism and you get many different colors. The size of the spheres can effect how the light is split and which colors appear.

Oh! you answered!! what a treat to see this in my inbox. felt like i mailed bill nye and got back a letter.

It's so neat that it gets such nice colors just from the arrangement of silica! Also ey I recognized that mineral because it crosses over to my side of science: Microbiology. There's this algae group called Diatoms and the special thing about them (aside from being the major carbon dioxide sink and oxygen factory of the planet) is their cell walls are made of silicon dioxide. Under the microscope they look very very nice, like the first time i saw them i couldnt imagine these stuff could be living organisms

I remembered that they look all holo on the slides, so i checked and yeah! some opals are made from diatoms that have died and settled as sediment at bodies of water!! Diatoms are even called 'living opals'. haha it's so nice to see that microbiology and geology could be linked like that.