[Rockhounds] Geology in Progress

[Kitty & Bill Heacox]

Nice story, Larry.

I think I may have mentioned this a few years ago, but there's a place 
in New Zealand called Kiritehere Beach where the sand has a very high 
iron content.  The sand looks like the black sand here in Hawaii, which 
is fine grain lava basalt, but is highly attracted to a magnet, so much 
so that you can fill a glass vial with it and a small ordinary magnet 
will pick up the whole vial.  At one time a plan was proposed to use 
some process to mine or extract the iron from the beach for profit.  
Fortunately that idea was discarded, because it is a beautiful beach 
---see link below.  The beach also has abundant fossils of what look 
like ferns, clams, and some other kind of shells (sorry, I'm not a 
fossil hound).  The following link was the best I could do to find a 
picture and hopefully more information.  You can see the black sand, but 
not the rest of the beach, and I couldn't find any mention of the sand 
being full of iron.  For those of you familiar with New Zealand, it is 
on the North Island, west side, not far from Waitomo Caves (which are 
very interesting in themselves, for the underground lake and worms on 
the ceiling which glow in the dark).

http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/2022059340042404614HgyWsJ

Aloha, K.

Lawrence Rush wrote:
> At one end of the Charlestown Beach, near the breachway, the winter 
> storms had winnowed great strands of Magnetite sand into long surf 
> driven "windrows", several feet wide, about six inches deep, and 
> hundreds of yards long. Pure, black, and striking. When I dug into it 
> to find the depth, I found a band of Garnet just below it, also just 
> as long and wide. Evidently these were separated by density with the 
> high, strong surf this Fall and Winter. Not really unusual, but 
> surprising to see so much of the minerals, originally derived from the 
> New England hard rock highlands, concentrated like that. I have 
> sometimes collected Magnetite from beach sands with a magnet, but this 
> time a shovel would have given me all I could ever hope for.