Zebra Rock Mine

From Katherine, along Victoria River, there were a few fires beside the road, which look like backburning.

We did a short stop near Victoria River, climbed up for the spectacular view over the wide canyon and the river. It's croc infested, so no swim for us. It was hot enough that the boys didn't bother coming out of the car for the climb, which suits everyone fine.

On the morning tour, Ruth explained how rare Zebra rock is, how noone knows how it formed, and how they'd like to protect one pocket of it. 

There are layers of iron rich stone, with some kind of soft soap stone. It slightly swirls in places. 

This is the main deposit that they'd like to preserve. It's only about 30cm thick. The swirl lines never cross each other. They only touch together sometimes.

Our mining for the morning. They have some other pockets that they use to supply visitors, so as to spread the word.

Lou and friend  - Opal is Ruth's daughter and she has quite a collection of pets - a blue tongue, 3 cane toads, and a snake.

 Some great zebra stone samples.

Getting some attention from Opal's pet python.

Got to the Zebra Rock Mine campground. In the afternoon, we did a jigsaw puzzle.

Then we sat in on another talk from Ruth, before buying rock jewellery in the gallery.

Some bits look like chocolate chunks in a cake, some look like swirled marble cake, some look like finely layered tiramisu.

So it seems it started as sedimentary, then did some change under later volcanic heating. There are pockets of iron stone though, so they can't explain how that came to be. Some Monash science people got a piece, and their friends put it under a massive microscope. All the magnetic elements were aligned, so they think that the area was at the South Pole, when Australia was joined to Antarctica, so the swirls might be following magnetic lines, and this may be how they came to move and line up, and maybe how the materials coalesced.

Not sure from when this guy dates from.

Ollie finished it off while we checked out the rocks and fossils in the gallery.