Weird souvenirs: meet my rock collection

I started a Weird Souvenirs series a long time ago and it didn’t get beyond two installments. Well, here’s the third and it’s an expansion of the first, which was about a piece of lava I brought back from Holuhraun. This is my rock collection.

A pile of bits of rock, pebble and stone from the Jurassic coast

It’s actually four rock collections. The first three are all local bits of Jurassic coast rocks and they’re interesting – limestone, chalk, quartz, fossils etc. But the fourth collection is more interesting and I know more about it.

My Icelandic rock collection. This one is a mixture of rocks of all colours

I’m going to literally address the elephant in the room. This rock collection sits on something called “my elephant table”. It’s a wooden elephant with a tree canopy over its head carved out of a single piece of tree, which I brought home from work because it has a big crack in it. It’s such a cute little table.

So, in the unlikely event anyone’s interested in seeing what the geology of Iceland looks like up close, this is the blog for you.

Pieces of lava gravel

This is lava. This is the gravel from the bottom of the Blue Lagoon. I bring home a couple of pieces every time I go and now I’ve got enough to make a necklace. I thought I could drill through them with a tiny drill bit and I know my Dremel-a-like isn’t strong enough but I suspect that if I put it in my dad’s big drill, the bit would break. If you’ve got any suggestions how to turn these bits into necklace, let me know in the comments.

A perfect oval-shaped sea-rounded black pebble

This perfect round black pebble came from the beach at Djúpalónssandur. It’s a perfect round black pebble, smoothed out by the sea. It feels like walking on any normal pebble beach except it’s black and so I popped a small pebble in my pocket. I love rocks.

P1060059

This one isn’t from Iceland. It’s not a rock, either, so technically it shouldn’t be in a rock collection. Well, I suppose it kind of is rock. It’s a piece of iron ore and it’s from the mine in Kiruna. The Kiruna mine is enormous. A huge proportion of the iron in Europe came out of that mine and it’s got so big that they’ve literally moved the town because it was at very high risk of collapsing into the mine. When I went in 2014 or 2015, they’d been talking about it for some years and I was surprised that it wasn’t already happening, except that they’d moved the station out of the town. I’ve seen pictures from this winter of buildings being transported down the road so I know it’s got started. Anyway, the tourist office had a little basket of iron ore marbles for souvenirs and what better to symbolise Kiruna on your rock shelf?

Real volcanic pumice

Three little bits of pumice which I picked up around Askja. This volcano sprayed the entire top-right corner of Iceland with yellow pumice during its 1875 eruption, poisoning the land and the animals and causing a non-lava-related volcanic disaster. While I was swimming in the crater, a tiny piece of pumice floated past and I grabbed it because floating rock but by the time I’d paddled back to shore, got dressed in the rain and climbed out of the crater, I’d lost it.

Four different pieces of rhyolite. It's a crunchy-looking rock

This is rhyolite and at one point, my blog was named after it. I can’t remember the name and I can’t find it on the blog timeline I made last week (I’m still very much open to the idea of a combined travel/lifestyle/personal blog called Rhyolite & Rhinestones). It’s the volcanic equivalent of granite, it’s full of silica and it comes in so many colours. The rainbow mountains around Landmannalaugar are rhyolite. It’s so pretty, it’s one of my favourite rocks.

Dark reddish-brown spiky lava rock

These are a lot smaller than they look. It’s a couple of pieces of reddish scoria from the sides of craters. No idea what craters. This is actual lava, it’s made of basalt and it’s kind of spiky and holey because, like pumice, it has air blown through it. The result is less holey and more solid, though, so it doesn’t float.

A piece of very spiky very black lava. It's pretty heavy

I must have talked about this in its own post but in brief, this came from the 2014-15 Holuhraun eruption and it’s full of heavy metals, so it’s darker and heavier and spikier than it would normally be. If you’re exploring the lava field, falling over could be extremely painful. For reasons I don’t really understand, the magma was kind of “off” – I think it had been churning around for a while, it wasn’t the fresh kind full of silica and basalt that Icelandic eruptions usually produce. It was full of iron and magnesium and titanium. While heavy lava isn’t my favourite rock, this particular piece is one of my favourites.

Two pieces of black rock, both raw obsidian. It's not as shiny as the processed version. One is a pitted cube of rock and one's a smoother sharper piece that looks a bit like it's been

Last of all, obsidian. You’ve seen it shiny and cut into arrowheads and things like this. This is what it looks like when you pick it up from a gravelly floodplain. I thought I could make it shiny but it turns out there’s more involved than just giving it a scrub with a toothbrush. I know someone with a rock tumbler (they’re in Sweden so it’s not very convenient to send my piece of obsidian) but on the whole, I think I’d now like to leave it raw.

And that’s it. I’ve got other scraps in my rock collection but I think it’s all just more bits of red and black lava and bits of rhyolite and a darker brown bit of pumice. I like rocks.