[Rockhounds] "Kraokinite"

[pmodreski at aol.com]

I wanted to share this exchange of notes Carol Bova and I had about the "kraokinite"; what I looked up makes me think it probably does refer to kaolinite in snowflakes.  You'll find that the old (1884) article Carol sent the link to, right below, is quite interesting:



"Take a look at this... could it be this pumice from Krakatoa that was found in snowflakes?



http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-049X%28189401%2932%3A143%3C343%3ADFTKEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage


What you say is quite possible, Carol.  That was a real interesting excerpt from the Krakatoa article, thanks for sending that link.

Of course, the big eruption of Krakatoa was in 1883, so only snowflakes from that year or thereabouts would contain such nuclei.

But I easily found via google, references to study of dust particle nuclei within snowflakes.  Here's one good scientific article about this, 


Mineral Dust Aerosols as Ice Forming Nuclei
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/archives/projects/gccs/2001/student_work/nathan.pdf
in which one reads,



"...mineral dust particles are often collected from the centers of snowflakes.

Kaolinite especially has been identified by electron microscopy with sizes ranging from

0.1 to 4 μm in snowflake centers (Rogers and Yau, 1989)."

μm in snowflake centers (Rogers and Yau, 1989)."

I think this is the kind of thing that the person may have been referring to when they wrote that label for Georgia, and "kraokinite" just ended up that way as a misspelled or misread version of kaolinite.

Pete




-----Original Message-----
From: Al Balmer <albalmer at att.net>
To: Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors <rockhounds at lists.drizzle.com>
Sent: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 2:16 pm
Subject: Re: [Rockhounds] "Kraokinite"

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:26:31 -0400, "Jeffrey T. Cessna"
<jcessna at nist.gov> wrote:

>My guess is that Georgia is trying to write a newsletter summary for 
>a club meeting she could not attend based on notes taken by someone 
>who was not the club secretary. The secretary was running the 
>meeting, but was also the rockhound who mentioned the confusing 
>mineral name (at the meeting).
>
>The rockhound was visiting a glacier in or near Banff National Park 
>(in Canada) and wanted to collect some glacier tumbled rocks. The 
>explanation for not finding any was that they were at such a high 
>altitude that the only thing coming out of the glacier was 
>"kraokinite." Which was reported to be a fine dust that serves as the 
>nucleation point in the formation of snowflakes.

Very good! <G> Your hypothesis seems to fit all the known facts, at
least.
>
>This suggests that the earlier answer of kaolinite might be the 
>correct name. Searching with that spelling produces much more information.
>
Yes. I tried answers.com, since they apparently use a soundex
algorithm to suggest alternate spellings, but the closest suggestion
was "granite."

>...or it could be a completely unrelated question.
>
>-Jeff Cessna
>



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