the work crew found this, thought i would ask here what it is/was

[zemetrius]

they found a lot of this rock when they were digging friday (the 14th 2020), the job site was in north las vegas, everyone thought it was some really old corral (since the vegas valley used to be underwater a long, long.......long, long time ago:




ok let the games begin.

if someone knows what this is (or might be) i will pass it on to the crew, they will be interested in knowing.

thanks any help with this.

 

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[Charlie P. (NY)]

Possibly a "Fulgurite".

Formed where the the soil/sand has absorbed a lightning strike.

 

[zemetrius]

the work crew was digging ground to lay in a gas line several feet underground, so i hope this piece (they dug up a lot of this "rock") was not created due to lightning strike, that would be a bad thing in this case.

 

[Older The Better]

If you are in a lake bed could be gypsum

Or being west maybe a volcanic ash? I don’t know if Vegas ever had nearby volcanoes but probably more likely than here in Kansas

 

[zemetrius]

when i got home, it was pretty dirty after being in the ground, when i put it in water, there was a white residue coming off of the rock. first thought was that it was coral, but did not see any old shell deposits like from more current coral.

 

[danloop]

when i got home, it was pretty dirty after being in the ground, when i put it in water, there was a white residue coming off of the rock. first thought was that it was coral, but did not see any old shell deposits like from more current coral.

Why would there be more current Coral? I've found Horn Coral along a creek in Indiana. No seawater there for a long time.

 

[zemetrius]

the current coral i mention, my wife has a piece of white coral, she had it before we were married, her 2nd husband was in the military so she traveled a lot when he changed bases, she got it in her travels.

 

[NVNutcase]

Lots of gypsum in the Vegas area

 

[CaptEsteban]

Hmm , maybe Borax ?

 

[Red-Coat]

It looks to me like ‘tufa’, which is a hard but porous variety of limestone formed when carbonate minerals precipitate out of water. It often forms in knobbly lumps around bacterial/algal matter associated with springs and may also encase bits of plant debris, shells etc.

On the northern outskirts of the city in the Tule Springs area bordering the Aliante Golf Club there are around 300 acres of exposed tufa beds, known as the ‘tufa trail’. They were formed by carbonate-rich groundwater discharge from the springs roughly 10-20,000 years ago and, being harder and coarser than the surrounding sediments, have survived erosion to create what is known as an ‘inverted topography’ that mimics the pattern of the streams and rivulets that one ran in this area.

Tufa deposits are usually grey to brown rock with an irregular knobbly shape and numerous small cavities that may have the appearance of bubbles. This would be typical:

 

[GoldieLocks]

Not enough lightening strikes I think around to make that much. I suspect it is natural calcite.

 

[zemetrius]

the crew said the stuff was very hard to dig through.

 

[Red-Coat]

Tumbled Angelite Angelic Reiki Tumble Stone View attachment 1802262

And the relevance of this is what, exactly? Angelite is a non-geological name for a blue-grey variant of anhydrite that comes only from Peru and is peddled as a 'healing stone' for the throat chakra.

 

[NVNutcase]

Also, lots of Caliche around Vegas .

 

[bradyboy]

limestone?

 

[zemetrius]

yeah the crew said this stuff was harder than caliche, they know that stuff very well, they hate digging through it.