Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
Stephen Challener wrote:
I discussed and sent Rondeau a sample of Australian opal with digits, and then never heard from him again.
That's disappointing, not to mention, the waste of an interesting opal and incurred postage charges. His contact info has remained the same; it's all listed on this page: https://www.univ-nantes.fr/benjamin-rondeau
Perhaps a follow up letter, in French, might be in order.
It was back in 2014. I'm guessing it just went to the bottom of the pile, but let's just say I'm glad my next attempt at collaborating with an established gem researcher went a lot better.
Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2008 6:13 pm Posts: 5077 Location: Australia
Stephen, can I ask why you sent it to someone in France and not to someone in Aus with a good rep? I'm assuming here it's an Australian Opal as written in your post and not an Ethiopian opal... but we know what they make of 'assume'. Did you take photos of it?
I have an Aussie opal I cut that displays a wonderful ?
I forget the term we use when a stone displays a 'picture/image' created during formation. Can anyone else remember what it is?
Huh, didn't see this had been peeled out into another thread. I sent the sample to him because he'd specifically been studying digit patterns as he calls them, but said in the paper that he had not seen an example in Australian precious opal, only one in common opal. I assumed he'd be interested in seeing some and it might further his research--I was also hoping to possibly establish some sort of collaboration with gemological researchers since I wanted to do such research myself in some capacity. Since I brought it up based on eight-year-old memories I went back and reread the emails. I sent him this sample to examine:
thinking the fire pattern looked like the result of digit patterns. It wasn't a super expensive stone and only showed pronounced play of color when wet. His impression after looking at it was that it was likely just faulting with later infilling of opal, but he wasn't willing to saw or grind into it even with my permission to get a clear view unless it was donated, otherwise he'd just send it back. I said he could have it if it would help the research (since I was pretty sure that it was definitely not just random filled cracks), he said he'd have a look and then presumably didn't get to it. I'd be hypocritical to complain too much about that in isolation since I also have some difficulty remembering to follow up from time to time. Still I wonder if he ever did get a cross-section examined, and maybe I should email him again and ask. I later sent him some pictures of faulting across digit patterns in an ethiopian opal (which he said were interesting and asked for more pictures of), and later yet I found an unambiguous example of digit patterns in australian black precious opal which I sent pictures of, and again got a response but he didn't seem terribly interested so I figured he wasn't interested in the topic anymore. At that point I stopped sending him emails. Point being he didn't ghost me and I don't want to give that impression, he just never gave me any further updates on that specimen after I donated it.
When you said digits, I thought you meant numbers! Mine has an apostrophe in the middle. Now I did think at one moment I saw an actual word as well but I'd have to look for that again. I was concentrating more on the ?.
These digits when solid columns must have raised eyebrows because the synthetic opal has columns too.
I shot him another email and heard back--he was able to locate the specimen and examine it. Looks like it is indeed showing digit patterns which is neat, along with a little bit of unusual (for Australia) full-spectrum play of color. So that's neat.
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