Creating opals
Opals in months—not millions of years!
by Andrew A. Snelling
Opals have fascinated people for centuries. As early as the first century
AD, the Roman Pliny wrote of opals:
‘In them you shall see the living fire of ruby, the glorious purple of the
amethyst, the sea-green of the emerald all glittering together in an incredible
mixture of light.’
Mark Antony loved them, and is thought to have assaulted a senator to get a particularly
nice one. Napoleon presented Josephine with ‘The Burning of Troy’,
a magnificent red example. Shakespeare called them ‘that miracle and
queen of gems’, and Queen Victoria of Great Britain made the new discoveries
from far-off Australia a fashion necessity.
Prized for their vivid hues, Australia’s renowned precious opals command retail
prices from US$5 to $3,000 per carat, depending on quality. The finest opals
have become more expensive than many other gems, and Australia is responsible for
practically all of the world’s supply. (Mexico is the only other significant
producer.) Coober Pedy, together with Andamooka and Mintabie, all in South
Australia, account for approximately 70 percent of total world production.
However, since 1988 the value of production from Lightning Ridge in New South Wales,
with its famed high-quality black opal, has outstripped the South Australian fields.
The opals are said to have formed millions of years ago (30 million years ago at
Coober Pedy), although the host rocks are all claimed to be more than 65–70
million years old. And surprising as it may seem, the ingredients of opal
are commonplace stuff. Water in the ground carrying dissolved silica (similar
to the glass in windows) is said to have seeped through beds of sand and grit, where
the silica particles are deposited in cracks. As the water subsequently evaporated,
the silica particles became ‘cemented’ together to form the opal.
Light bending around the silica produces the variety of glowing colours.
Fossils made of opal
Even fossils found in the host rocks have not escaped the percolating silica-rich
groundwaters. Occasionally, bones, seashells and seed pods are found fossilized
by having been ‘turned’ into opal. Perhaps the most famous example
in recent years is ‘Eric’ the pliosaur (a marine reptile), which was
the subject of high-profile public fund-raising by The Australian Museum in Sydney
in order to purchase these opalized bones from the Coober Pedy miner who found them
in 1987. ‘Eric’ is said to be about 100 million years old.
No wonder then, in most people’s minds, because of these claimed time scales,
and because of the almost universal perception/indoctrination that geological processes
are almost always slow and gradual, opals ‘must’ have taken a long time
to form in the ground.
‘Not so’, says Len Cram, a Lightning Ridge ‘bush’ scientist
who earned his Ph.D. for his opal research.
Secret of ‘growing’ opals
A committed Christian, Len has discovered the secret that has enabled him to actually
‘grow’ opals in glass jars stored in his wooden shed laboratory, and
the process takes only a matter of weeks! (See: Snelling,
A., Growing opals—Australian style! Creation 12(1):10–15,
1989.) Len’s man-made opals are so good that even experienced Lightning
Ridge miners can’t tell the difference between them and opals found in the
ground. Furthermore, scientists from Australia’s CSIRO (Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) can’t distinguish Len’s
opal from natural opal even under an electron microscope—they look identical!
No, Len is not about to disclose the formula and ‘flood’ the world with
man-made opals. His quest has always been to find out how opal forms so as
to discredit uniformitarian (slow and gradual) geological theories. He believes
the opals took only a few months to form within suitable portions of the thick sediment
layers laid down catastrophically during Noah’s Flood, and his experiments
undeniably demonstrate that this was feasible.
All it takes is an electrolyte (a chemical solution that conducts electricity),
a source of silica and water, and some alumina and feldspar. The basic ingredient
in Len’s ‘recipe’ is a chemical called tetraethylosilicate (TEOS
for short), which is an organic molecule containing silica. The amount of
alumina which turns to aluminium oxide determines the hardness of the opal.
The opal-forming process is one of ion exchange, a chemical process that involves
building the opal structure ion by ion (an ion is an electrically charged atom,
or group of atoms [molecule]). The process starts at some point and spreads
until all the critical ingredients, in this case the electrolyte, are used up.
Within a matter of weeks of this initial formation, the newly forming opal has beautiful
colour patterns, but it still has a lot of water in it. Slowly over months,
further chemical changes take place, the silica gel consolidating as the water is
‘squeezed’ out.
Len can now ‘grow’ opal in natural Lightning Ridge opal dirt, the sandy
grit in which the natural opals are found. Once the electrolyte is mixed into
the opal dirt, colour starts to form within four to six days. Seams of opal
then actually grow, identical in shape and form to that found in the ground, some
with colour and some without, the process taking about three months. Thus
seam opal is not necessarily a sedimentary deposit in previously existing cracks
in the opal dirt. Rather, the chemical reaction which ‘creates’
the opal makes the seam from the opal dirt itself where no crack or seam previously
existed. Len says this achievement is a ‘world first’, and that
viscosity evidently plays a major role in this crucial ion-exchange process.
Rapid opals fit Bible’s timescale
Len’s experiments not only provide an explanation of how opals form, but the
short timescale of only a matter of years is consistent with the biblical framework
and can readily account for the field observations of natural opal in its
host rocks. Furthermore, this means that his short timescale also applies
to the fossilization process. The bones of ‘Eric’ the pliosaur
(for example) need not have taken thousands or millions of years to fossilize.
The most likely explanation of their preservation via opalization is now therefore
the same replacement (ion-exchange) process that Len has so graphically demonstrated
in his glass jars, and that takes only months to years.
So the evolutionary ‘stories’ of opal formation and fossilization slowly
over thousands and millions of years have to be rewritten. Since pliosaurs
and other creatures need to be buried catastrophically to ensure their subsequent
fossilization, the rock layers hosting the opals and opalized bones are best explained
by catastrophic deposition during the global Flood. Chemical processes then
took over to form the opals in the rock layers and opalize the bones in the months
and years that followed.
Today we can admire and enjoy the beauty and fire of these dazzling precious opals
and opalized bones. But when we realize, elucidated by research based on creationist
presuppositions, that their formation resulted from catastrophic judgment bringing
death, we are reminded of our Creator who was judged and died on our behalf to again
transform dirt to beauty.
(Available in Finnish)
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