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A beautiful, very rare greenlandite sphere.
Greenlandite has been used as a gemstone in Greenland for many years, justly marketed as “the world’s oldest gemstone”.
Greenlandite was discovered in the 1960s in Isukasia north of Nuuk. The geological environment in which greenlandite was formed was in the order of 3.8 billion years old. This means that we are talking about one of the earths oldest formations!
Geologically speaking, the rock consist of quartzite with a large content of a green minerals - fuchsite - evenly distributed throughout, giving the stone a fresh green color. Greenlandite is a hard mineral, often translucent with a metallic inner glow derived from its many spangles. This type of stone is also known, in the jewelry trade, as aventurine quartz.
They were nicknamed "Yooperlites" which is derived from the name “yooper”. A yooper is a nickname for the Upper Peninsula natives and these fluorescent stones quickly gained fame. After data was published on these fluorescent stones, it was discovered that sodalite is the actual true mineral that is fluorescing orange.
365nm UV light is often called "blacklight". Before the advent of longwave UV LEDs, blacklight fluorescent tubes, (the kinds used in hippie days to light up psychedelic posters) were the standard longwave UV light for our hobby. They were not very powerful but they did light a large area.
Enter 365nm UV LEDs
First, an animation showing the difference between the UV flashlight we recommend (365nm filtered UV flashlight) versus unfiltered 395nm UV flashlights we see many folks carrying around at shows. So. much. visible purple light. We selected a bunch of rocks as a demonstration. Took pictures of them under his flashlight without the filter and then with the filter.
