Researchers believe colder currents likely are limiting the southern sea slug’s range because their prey lives abundantly along the Pacific Coast up to British Columbia. We have no idea whether this is part of the ongoing oscillation back and forth or if it’s perturbed by global warming probably both.” “We’re now entering again another warm phase. “At first, we were worried the nudibranchs were being killed off by something, but it turns out it’s more of a natural fluctuation,” said John Pearse, ecology and evolutionary biology professor at UC Santa Cruz. “We just didn’t see those winds.”Ī team of researchers from UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences, UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, the California Academy of Sciences and University of Zadar, Croatia, published a 2011 paper that predicated these rare oceanographic conditions would lead to a bloom of the nudibranchs. The good news? If you have the time and opportunity to take a trip to Oklahoma you stand a great chance of scoring a few rose rocks for your personal collection.“Northwesterly winds will basically blow away water at the surface, and deeper, colder waters will rise up and replace it,” Johnson said. Hard dirt appears to host better specimens, according to some prospectors. The majority of the places they are found are surface-level, but if you dig into these areas you can sometimes find better specimens under the surface of the earth. So, all you need to do is track down where other people have found their rose rocks and take a look. These digs are done on privately leased land rather than the public land most people collect from. They’re not commercially exploitable to a large degree (even with their rarity you’ll find smaller specimens for under $5) so there are only a few large-scale digs. Make sure to check for county ordinances if you’re planning on collecting some rose rocks.įinding Rose Rocks isn’t as much of a problem as you’d think. The law there was changed to allow an individual to collect six specimens per day. It appears the law was modified near Oklahoma City, but no record of anyone ever being cited for collecting the stones was available. Fortunately, no one really seemed to know the law. They vary by who owns the land, the state, and sometimes even the individual bit of land. Rockhounding laws always seem to leave us in a bit of a tizzy. The majority of rockhounds have noted they’re much easier to find when the lakes have a lower water level, so it may be best to take a look during the summer.Ĭredit: wikipedia The Law And Gathering Rose Rocks Among them are the areas surrounding noble and the Southern shore of Lake Stanley and the general Oklahoma City area.Īctually, most of the central Oklahoma lakes appear to have some level of rose rock formation. That said, there are a few publicly accessible places where the enterprising rockhound could go to find their own. Few people seek them out in quantity, but those that do note that you’ll find thousands of them in a few cubic meters and then not find anymore for miles. They appear to run in veins underneath the hardened earth.
There are small formations that have been found in Egypt and Arizona, among a few other areas, but they’re even more of an oddity than those in Oklahoma. These stones are rare in the grand scheme of things, although their price doesn’t reflect it.
The only appreciable formations of these stones appear in the state of Oklahoma, with the area around Noble being considered one of the hottest spots. We have some knowledge of how but not why these formations only occur in one stretch of Oklahoma instead of being common in areas with sandstone and barite formations. In any case, the formation of these stones isn’t known 100% and remains a bit of a mystery. Gypsum precipitates out of water in most formations, as does barite, and both form bladed crystals. While Rose Rocks are all made of barite (BaSO₄), the wider family also includes gypsum formations. It’s a good theory, but other theories hold that these rocks are still in the process of formation. The crystals of barite form as the water evaporate, trapping along with them the sand that was created by the water’s erosion. One of the working theories is that they’re caused by groundwater movement through the host sandstone. The exact formation of these crystals is still questioned.
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