Michael Li » Nature http://www.michael-li.com Progressively Designing My Life Sun, 05 Sep 2010 13:54:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Breathtaking Crystals of Naica Mine http://www.michael-li.com/breathtaking-crystals-of-naica-mine/2010/02/16/ http://www.michael-li.com/breathtaking-crystals-of-naica-mine/2010/02/16/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:06:57 +0000 Michael Li http://www.michael-li.com/?p=1360 These images from Discovery.com of the Naica Mine crystals are so amazing I had to post about it. The images of these giant crystals are unreal and the magnitude of them almost gives you a feeling of insignificance.

Nestling up to a cauldron of pressurized, molten rock is almost never a good idea. But in Mexico’s Naica mine, the payoff is worth the risk.

About 900 feet below the surface, there is a chamber filled with gypsum. It’s the same stuff that goes in the drywall in your house, only in Naica it spent half a million years parboiling in a chamber filled with magma-heated water.

Suddenly miners showed up and started pumping the mineral-rich broth out to get at valuable silver and lead deposits nearby. The result is a cavern filled with crystals 36 feet long and weighing in at up to 55 tons, easily the largest in the world…

See the complete story at Discovery.com – The Mega Crystals of Naica Mine: Big Pics.

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