February 03, 2024
We search a dangerous abandoned opal mine in Coober Pedy Australia (Opal mining documentary).
After 5 weeks at the literal grindstone (opal cutting and jewellery making) I manage to tootle up to Coobs for a quick mission. While still half asleep my mind wandered to an area of the Old 15 Mile that I realised we had never been down. This is significant in that there is almost nowhere we haven’t thoroughly searched on this field since discovering how beautiful the opal can be here about 30 years ago. As is often the case, anticipation quickly turns to frustration, not helped by precipitously dangerous ground with opal traces that is ready to collapse with a sneezing mouse. We do however escape the deadly red back spider and find some stunning crystal opal shells. In this video there is a fossil shell that is described as being often found in ‘skin’ form, almost always broken and as far as I’m aware never fully opalised. It is a strange phenomena as this field has produced hundreds of thousands of fully opalised shells of all sorts, but perhaps because of its size, this particular species never fully opalises. It possibly suffers the same fate as the plesiosaur skull, too large to opalise except in the rarest of cases. This short opal mining documentary is brought to you courtesy of worldclassopal.net , Kimberleyopal.com and opalauctions.com/stores/graceopal ..
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