TARGET 100120
The Cave of Giant Crystals
(The Moon Goddess' Jewelry Box)
That wall board in your house is two layers of cardboard with a white, powdered substance between it called gypsum. If you have ever been to Lyn's house and gone out to the White Sands National Monument, you have had a chence to see over 168 square miles of the same substance in the form of small sand-sized crystals, piled up in dunes which rival the dunes of the Sahara Desert. These sand-sized crystals, formed in a nearby lake bed, have been collecting in the dunes area over millions of years as the westerly desert winds blew them from the lake bed. If you've been to Lyn's home, you have seen larger crystals of the substance, each weighing a few pounds, and completely clear like water. Those crystals formed over millions of years in the depths of the earth. Only recently have we learned just how large the crystals can grow.
The crystals are called, "selenite", named after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon. They are a crystline structure of the combined molecules of calcium sulfate (CaSO4) and water (H20).
When I first saw the pictures of the "Cave of the Giant Crystals", I thought they had to be photoshopped. Sure enough, they weren't.
The giant crystals were found in 2000 by miners in a mine located between the towns of Naica and Delicias, in Chihuahua State, just south of the city of Chihuahua (see the dowsing feedback map, below), when their digging broke into one of the water-filled pockets in the earth. When they drained the water and entered into the pocket, they were amazed at the size and beauty of the crystals they found.
The pocket, itself, is around 30-by-90-feet (10-by-30-meters), and filled with the giant crystals. When the water was drained from the pocket, the growth of the crystals stopped, due to the removal of the mineral-rich water which surrounded them. The chamber holding these crystals is known as the Crystal Cave of Giants, and is approximately 1000 feet (31 meters) down in the limestone host rock of the mine. Because of its depth in the earth, the temperature is around 150 degrees fahrenheit (65 degrees celsius). The earth there is not earthquake prone, so the pocket in which the crystals grew has been a totally stable environment for all those years, allowing the crystals to continue growing without interruption or bounds.
Lead, zinc and silver are the principle elements being removed from the mine, and as with all mines, the ores will play out at some time. So, there is now a strong debate going on in Mexico as to whether the pocket will be allowed to refill with water so the crystaline growth can continue, or to turn the cave into a tourist site. There is also consideration for turning it into a World Heratige site. So, the fate of these crystals is now in the hands of politicians.
Because there is a chance that the cavern will be returned to its natural state, the pictures you see here and on the links listed below may be the only chance you will get to see these amazing giant jewels in "The Moon Goddess' Jewalry Box".
FEEDBACK MAP
To learn more about , take a look at the following web site:
BBC Daily News for a detailed study of the crystals' formation.
Crystal Links
Wikipedia
National Geographic
Oddity Central
and there are dozens of other sites about the crystal cave to be found by simply entering "Crystal caves" into a search engine.