Tiny Tuesday Minerals "Celestine"

Cast your mind back (don't cast mine, it's broken) ten days when I blipped a shot across Wickwar Quarry as part of the Wotton Walking Festival. We went out with a geologist who made great of the fact that Charfield lies on complicated geology. 

He stopped in one field and identified half a dozen different rocks within feet of each other, due to the amount of folding and combining of different layers over the ages, and one of these was Celestine. This is a pair of Celestine fragments, against the backdrop of a larger one I cut and semi-polished.

The odd thing is, when I go googling, all the celestine I find is bluey-grey in colour! Was he right? I've emailed him today, so I may find out about our rarer variety! Anyhow, the fragments are about an inch in length, and you can see under today's lovely sunshine all the crystals. It's quite easily crushed into a salt.

Celestine was used in the extraction of sugar from beet and is also used in fireworks where the high levels of strontium made a lovely red flash! Apparently we were a major source of Celestine in the world, and the largest crop is now buried under Yate shopping centre's car park!