![]() A collector may pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for large pieces of black obsidian. Is black obsidian expensive then?īlack obsidian is rarer and more valuable than brown obsidian, which is the most common form of stone. In the United States, Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico is a major source of black obsidian jewellery. The Spanish mined black obsidian in Guatemala for the production of canons. This rock is used for both decorative and industrial purposes. These cores are then crushed into smaller pieces and sorted by size. National Park Service)Īt the quarries, workers use picks to break away at large pieces of rock and hammers to dig into stone and obtain the obsidian core within the rocks. (Image credit: Flickr user Luis Tamayo, U.S. The stone is mined by chain-gang workers who are disabled or under a doctor’s care. These men are allowed to perform the mining even after they have been disabled by their conditions one in-person account describes a man who had not been able to move his hands for years.Ī black obsidian quarry in Turkey. Quarries often use slaves and people with medical problems to mine the stone. In some cases, black obsidian is simply mined from the ground. Black obsidian is found in Turkey, Venezuela, Guatemala and the eastern United States. The rareness depends on geography specifically, the number of exposed lava flows and heat produced by the volcano. There are a few different causes for this color, including oxidization and groundwater that washes over black lava flows into cracks in the rocks below. It is named for the dark black color it has when it first breaks from a volcanic vent. Black obsidian is one of the rarest types of obsidian, according to the Smithsonian. ![]()
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