Name: Taiwan's Rocks Talk! Chalcedony on the East Coast
Uploaded: 2025-09-28T14:50:46.000Z
Duration: 2 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Now we take these little bits and put them all together.

Or they could clump together and look like this.

From a microscopic perspective, these three rocks are all pretty much just like this, quartz.

And just like salt, quartz can actually dissolve in water at high temperatures.

Imagine this is a high-concentrated quartz soup, and the rocks below our Earth are practically made of this stuff.

And so this high-concentrate, silica-rich bed starts filling in all the nooks and crannies of all the rocks below us.

If it gets oversaturated, then the silica will start to leave the bed in the form of solid crystals.

This rock is filled with chalcedony, microscopic needle-like silica crystals that grow in a radiating pattern.

Imagine these open spaces were hyper-concentrated, super-hot silica soup.

If there are any little iron oxide impurities within the cracks of that microscopic silica, it'd be this color.

If there are little pieces of copper in between, it may look like this.

This is also a quartz vein, but what makes it different than this?

That's because the silica mixture that probably filled this crack may have been less concentrated.

Also, the quartz crystals in this vein are way larger.

White, brown, and even blue chalcedony can be found on Taiwan's east coast.

This is because Taiwan's coastal range used to be a group of volcanic islands.

Back then, there was lots of hydrothermal activity going on, creating a bunch of silica-rich soup, which later cooled down to form chalcedony.

OK, this last one is a red jasper, and it isn't semi-transparent like chalcedony, but it's still made of microscopic quartz crystals.

However, unlike chalcedony, they have a grain-like shape.

So for this rock, there must also be some oxidized iron in between the silica crystals, making it such a dark red color.

In Taiwan, all of these rocks are considered semi-precious gemstones, and all have unique names.

Like this one is glutinous rice cake jade, and this one is chicken blood rock.

All around Taiwan, any rock with a unique appearance is given a special name and can have value.

So like this one, have you heard of rose stone?

Leave what you know or any questions in the comments.