Once Upon a Gemstone
BY ADRIENNE BERARD
or longer than recorded history, gemstones have been used to tell stories. Passed down through generations, they carry the legends of our ancestral past. They also carry with them a much, much older history: the geological echoes of our planet’s very formation. As shifts deep within the Earth’s core drove its tectonic plates, compression, heat, and chemical reactions created a new set of minerals, beautiful to the human eye. Understanding that these were objects of record, of permanence, humans wove their own, new stories around them, making meaning from mystery.
Peridot of the splitting sea
The island of Zabargad in the Red Sea has been home to the world’s finest specimens of peridot for as long as 3,500 years, since its mines were first worked for Egyptian Pharaohs. The island was created roughly 30 million years ago, during the original parting of the Red Sea, when the Earth’s crust separated, folding up mountains and opening an expanse of salt water.
During this shift, small crystals of olivine, a mineral found in the Earth’s mantle, formed peridot. As seawater rushed through fractures in the ocean floor, peridot was thrust through the mantle’s layers and redeposited at the surface. Serpentine veins of peridot still run along Zabargad’s east-west fault zone under the Mediterranean sun. The story of its deep origins found its way into the final book of the Bible, Revelations, in which John the Divine is in exile on the Greek island of Patmos. According to the story, it is there that God speaks to him, telling him the world will be reforged, that the sea will drain away and leave land. On that land will be a new Jerusalem and the foundation of the city will be made of precious stone. One of those stones will be peridot.
Diamond of the Earth’s core
Diamonds are born deep in the Earth, from the oldest pieces of continental crust—ancient relics of the planet’s formation. Their translucent bodies hold stories that date back billions of years. Imperfections trapped within the diamonds bear the signatures of the crust below ancient oceans, and of ancient life—dead matter forced back into continental crust, some 100 miles below where living creatures took their last breaths. Under tremendous pressures and temperatures, these elements were forged into an indestructible stone that would live for 3.5 billion years, holding tales of a prehistoric past. Even now, the true process of diamond formation remains a mystery. What is known is that diamonds were created from limestone that was stripped of its oxygen atoms, leaving only pure carbon. They were brought to Earth’s surface on a magma called kimberlite, as it was forced through the chimneys of volcanoes in one giant heave. Over time, the diamonds drifted into rivers and valleys. In the Middle Ages, fables said that diamonds came from “the land where it is six months day and six months night.” They were guarded by venomous creatures who wounded themselves on the stones’ sharp crystalline points, saturating them with venom. Whether because of that story or despite it, diamonds were said to have medicinal qualities—namely as an antidote for poisons.
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