A Yooperlite?

Every now and then, I take a short break from posting about Aotearoa. This is one of those times. I'll get back to looking at New Zealand with the next publication. 

Today, I want to share that unique treasure I mentioned back at the end of my New Year's Eve cave post. 

We got a Christmas package from Kathleen and Lee.  There was a jar of the very rare and exotic thimbleberry jam that we like so much inside and some teas of various kinds.  And then, down at the bottom of the package was a rock. It was labelled, from the U.P.  (Upper Peninsula of Michigan.)

"What a thoughtful gift," I said to Jeanne and Allie. Here is a little piece of Michigan, sent nearly half way 'round the world for us to treasure. A piece of home to hold. Later, when I told Lee that the package had arrived, he told me that there was much more to this rock than it first appears.

 He told me that it is a Yooperlite. That parts within it glow when lit by an ultraviolet or 'black' light. As soon as I heard that, I began searching for a black light locally, but quickly discovered that I would need to order one from an on line source. 




When my black light torch arrived, I put it to immediate use.  
These are the pictures I took of the rock under UV radiation.  

Below, you'll find a link to a video that describes the history of these rocks.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQnzUaTAXGc

This is a shot of rocks in a shallow cave on the beach I showed you in the header picture. If I had had a U.V. flashlight when I took this, who knows what we might be seeing?   

What an amazing world we live in.  I wonder what it would look like to us if we were were able to see in a wider range of wavelengths than we actually can?

Astronomers are able to "see" the universe in not only visible wavelengths, but also radio, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and even gamma-ray. The clouds of interstellar dust that make some areas of the universe invisible to us in visible light, become clear when observed with other wavelengths. I love reading about that kind of stuff.  

And since this short post is about an example of seeing, and the light that allows us to do so, whatever its wavelength, I thought I'd include a couple of videos I ran across some time ago that deal with light. That deal with slowing it down, or that deal with making it possible to see it, as if it were slowed down. 

I listed the shorter video first, in case you have a limited amount of time. It really is amazing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6HxdUQm5s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ

I hope you were able to enjoy both of these videos. They say it's important for us mature folk to keep our minds active and this sort of thing intrigues me. And I hope it does my brain some good besides.

This gift got me thinking once again about this world of ours. I talked about this back when I showed you pictures of Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel.  

We tend to be in awe of what we see here in New Zealand.  But to someone from New Zealand, our home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula would be equally awe inspiring. 

I once told someone here that the U.P. in places, can get 250 inches of snow per year. I converted that for them to 635 centimetres. I don't think they believed me.   

I was in a store recently that had a large vat of Canadian maple syrup. This is a rarity here and extremely expensive. Empty bottles were available nearby that you could fill from the spigot on the vat. A label on the vat described the natural wholesomeness of this exotic product and exquisite, dark, rich flavor. I guess they needed the label to explain the price they were asking.  (And U.P. maple syrup is even better, in my opinion.) 

When Jeanne and I were being driven up and down the hills of Waiheke Island just off shore from Auckland, we commented that we felt as though we were back in the Houghton-Hancock area. And pointed out that the Yoopers in those cities not only deal with hills every bit as long, steep and twisting as those on Waiheke, they do it when the roads are covered in ice.  

We have Lake Superior (82,103 square km).  We have our color season. We have pasties. We have the Copper Country with it's thimbleberries and now Yooperlites.  

I think the world is pretty much exotic everywhere. What is exotic to a person just depends on where he's not from.  

And thanks again Lee and Kathleen, for such wonderful treats.                     -djf