New here. Just purchased a rough polished stone. Has something shiny silver embedded in it. Can anyone explain what it may be?
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Welcome. It is most likely pyrite that you are seeing.
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Totally agree with Islandmomma, Sometimes the pyrites look like silver, a lot has to do with the visible reference. I have some lapis with pyrites and they look like silver against the dark surface of the stone but really they are a very pale gold color.
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They can be marcasite inclusions to!
When buying stones always be ready for things like this. The flaw is called an inclusion. An inlusion is all natural and occurs when a group of mineral or many minerals are encased in another body of somewhat homogenous rock. The main group rock is called the host rock or sometimes the matrix material. The minerals that occur at a lesser amount within the host rock are called inclusions. Rocks are made of minerals and minerals are specific chemical/elemental compositions that naturally occur in the earths crust. These minerals make up rock. Sometimes though you can have contaminant minerals ocurring in a mainly homogenous rock form like quartz for instance and those two substances behave differently and grow and form differently as well as cool at different rates and compress at different rates. These differences can give rise to the inclusions of other minerals being trapped in the host rock thats mainly homogenous. Quartz rock is an example. Quartz is normally translucent and you cam see the trapped other minerals easily and see how they grew after polished the raw quartz. A good example of this is the Mineral Rutile. This combination gives you Rutilated Quartz. It looks like a big clear rock crystal quartz stone with many needles of a golden color running through it. For every rutile point that you see was a tiny little grouping of the mineral rutile which cooled at a rate when formed that allowed the growth of the mineral pool into a long needle-like crystal of rutile within the quartz body where it was trapped. These same phenomena happen in Turquoise which gives as all the variations in mines and within mines making them all look different due to the inclusions of things like Pyrite and marcasites which are iron based minerals. In opaque rocks you only know the positions of these inclusions after breaking the rocks and also after sanding abd polishing the rocks. Sometimes these inclusions can occur along with trapped gas bubbles, air pockets, or even where the rocks structure traps tiny caverns of moisture/water within itsself with no exhaust holes for the air or water to escape during formation which is how a geode or a pocket of drusy occurs. You got an extra special stone there! Welcome to the group!
~Koliopee
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