Any geology type folks here?

[Evil D]

I have a habit of finding unusual rocks and giving them to my daughter. I found this one yesterday and I'm curious if anyone can tell me what it is. The shiny side almost looks like obsidian? I even thought for a second it might just be a big chunk of welding slag but it isn't magnetic. Then I thought maybe it's coal but it has more of a glass look to it than coal.




Kinda difficult to photograph.

[JD Spydo]

One of my very best friends is a serious rock hound. I've bought some tools to do it myself but just haven't gotten into it yet. We have tons of really cool fossils embedded in limestone here locally.
I've got another hunting buddy that is really into finding arrowheads and he's found a big bunch of them in the past 2 to 3 years.

Geology is a fascinating subject to me. We also have caves here in Missouri that have lots of onyx and many different varieties of quartz.

[The Mastiff]

Evil, that sure looks like slag from the steel making process. Near a rail line or old steel making area where it could have been dumped?

[Evil D]

Evil, that sure looks like slag from the steel making process. Near a rail line or old steel making area where it could have been dumped?

Not really but it was an old part of Cincinnati. Wouldn't it be magnetic?

[JD Spydo]

As far as your pic goes>> it has a similar look to it as a type of coal known as "anthracite coal". Anthracite is the hardest known type of coal with a carbon content higher than any other type of coal.

A good friend of mine in years past worked for a coal company here in Missouri known as "Peabody Coal". He showed me a sample of about 6 types of coal found here in Missouri. The anthracite coal caught my eye because it had a more glassy and shiny appearance than most of the other types of coal did at the time.

They really don't mine a lot of coal here in Missouri but they still do some for specialty purposes. But like Mastiff said it could also be a slag material of some sort too. Not sure if magnetic properties alone are a surefire identification. I'm surprised more people haven't chimed in at this point. Because people that have rock hound hobbies have been growing in numbers in the past few years I'm told.

[Doc Dan]

It is hard to tell from the pic. It might be a piece of old pottery.

[JD Spydo]

It is hard to tell from the pic. It might be a piece of old pottery.

Doc I had a very good friend of mine whose mother was an expert in pottery and ceramics and most of the stuff she showed me was homogeneous in structure. I never seen anything of her's that had all kinds of aggregate in it like this rock or ceramic sample seems to have.

Now I used to work in a steel foundry a few years back and the slag that we would pull ( or rake) off the top of a heat of molten steel sometimes would look similar to what Evil D showed us>> after it cooled of course :eek: . But like Mastiff said there are all kinds of different slag and many types of slag look very different from sample to sample.

[flasharry]

Looks a bit like boiler clinker form a steam loco... A real simple definition of "clinker" in a steam loco is "melted ash".. happens when the cold ahs gets mixed in with the hot coal fire, usually from improper firing by the fireman..The ash then melts and the resulting goo-ey mess sticks together and forms a glassy tarry substance, that can really clog up your grates...

[Evil D]

Here's a few better shots.





This one in particular looks like rust, but again it isn't magnetic so I really don't think this is metal/iron.


This is the bit that really looks like obsidian to me.


There seems to be a lot of little air pockets or bubbles in the texture which made me think it may be volcanic rock.

[JD Spydo]

I no longer believe it's any type of coal>> that looks like typical slag of some sort. However I've also seen some petrified wood samples that look strangely similar.
It could be some type of mineral composition that you sometimes see in Sedimentary layers of the earth as well. But if I had to place a bet I would go with some type of slag.

[Doc Dan]

It is not pottery. It could be a meteorite.

[flasharry]

still looks like coal clinker to me..

[BLUETYPEII]

delete

[The Mastiff]

Cincinnati used to have a lot of iron producing smallish companies back in the 1880's and 90's but that looks more to me like the stuff I used to see that was carried from the large steel blast furnaces up and down line from me that littered the tracks of the rail line that ran through ( Then the B&O ) my back yard. Often the chunks were a lot larger and had slabs of what looked like obsidian glass. That in the picture is what the base of the slag/glass pieces looked like. The furnaces used limestone, taconite pellets and coke and the iron would sink to the bottom because of weight leaving the remainder at the top to be skimmed off. There was a lot of it and it was dumped or carried off to other places hence it being common on rail sidings within a few hundred miles of the steel mills. I'm not all that sure it is magnetic. It's not all that heavy either.

It could be from glass production also. That was another commodity in that area because of the brewers that were another fairly large industry in Cincinnati. During WW2 they made munitions and had aluminum production too though I don't know what that would look like. There were like 15 railroads through and around Cincinnati in the past so who really knows.

Without testing about the best guesses would be looking at the history of the land where you found the item.

Joe

[Doc Dan]

I’m pretty sure it’s something SEF left behind.

[ChrisinHove]

I’m pretty sure it’s something SEF left behind.

:D

Slag is quite light in weight, isn’t it? How heavy is this?

That glassy finish is certainly heat created. I wondered about meteorite as well. Was this dissimilar to surrounding geology? Regarding the slag/clinker possibility, was it found in a location likely - or even possible- to have such waste deposits?

[Cambertree]

Looks very similar to some rocks I found when I was a kid. When I showed them to a geologist friend of my parents he said they were a slag byproduct of some sort of smelting process.

[Evil D]

I’m pretty sure it’s something SEF left behind.

:D

Slag is quite light in weight, isn’t it? How heavy is this?

That glassy finish is certainly heat created. I wondered about meteorite as well. Was this dissimilar to surrounding geology? Regarding the slag/clinker possibility, was it found in a location likely - or even possible- to have such waste deposits?

It was in this lot...



It looked like a building had been tore down but everything around that lot looked like it had always been residential but it's hard to say for sure. Looking at satellite there aren't any railroads anywhere close to there but who knows what was there 100 years ago, at one time Cincinnati had a huge canal running through the middle of it so a long forgotten railroad isn't out of the question. I guess any of those buildings could also have been factories at one time and converted to residential?



And yes that mural is pretty awesome :cool:

[The Mastiff]

Not all that far north of that street is a place called " Glass Alley". Perhaps they were making glass around there. On the other hand looking at the age of those buildings I'd bet every one used to have coal boilers in them when first built. All we can do is guess though. If I get time I'll look that area up on an old railroad map and see if there are obvious industries nearby.

Joe

[ChrisinHove]

A major rail centre as well as some steel and iron works, historically, according to wiki. Probably slag used as infill, or just dumped, would be my guess.

Quite an interesting read about the abandoned Cincinnati underground railway, as well.....