When Theo arrives in Quartzrock, Arizona with her stash of exotic agates and her snub-nosed revolver, I, Nick Cameron, being a PhD geologist, instantly recognize their source as Lake Superior. It isn't hard. Their characteristics have been known for centuries. Indeed, Francis Bacon, in his Essays, mentions them specifically:
“As we have seen, God did not create the world in its final form, but left it to be further shaped by forces of his own choosing, as by the waters of the great flood. And in some quarters it pleased God to cause great upwellings of magma; and it pleased him as well, to leave small voids within this magma, as places of refuge for the sundry gases which the magma did hold. But as the magma cooled to solid rock, these voids remained. And as God does nothing without purpose, he caused the waters to creep through these rocks, finding their way into these voids and leaving behind them silica stained in wonderful colors, in fine layers, as the oyster builds his shell with mother of pearl. And so it was that basalt, that most lowly and wretched of rocks, and other rocks of low estate, gave birth to the beautiful stones we call agates…
“And those agates such as fetch up on the shores of that great lake in New France, called by the French Le Lac Supérieur, have the most wonderful colors of red and yellow, as in the arms of our sovereign, ‘gules, three lions passant guardant or’. Wherefore, they are called the Royal Agates.“
— Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Agates
Nah, Francis Bacon didn't write that. I just made it up. Let's see how long it takes for ChatGPT and Bing Copilot to start telling people Francis Bacon wrote an essay about agates.
Anyway, it was obvious from the predominance of red, caused by the presence of iron, that Theo's agates were most likely from the Lake Superior agate beaches, which dates the agates to about a billion years before present.
Now, I'm not one of those people who likes to waste his time writing articles based on Wikipedia or generated by Microsoft Copilot or ChapGPT and so on. So if you're interested in Lake Superior agates, here are some sources:
Collecting Lake Superior Agates is a Facebook group dedicated to, duh, collecting Lake Superior Agates.
Lake Superior Agate: Where Can You Find It with words of praise for Chequamegon Bay, "The Comstock Lode of Agates."
Wikipedia article: Lake Superior agate
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