Call me opal.  I'm a gem stone.  I'm sometimes called "The King of Gems."  That's because  I can be any color, up to 60 different shades, and my color changes with each direction that I'm tilted.  I'm actually multi-colored at any one angle.

The reason I am multi-colored is that I am made of silicon dioxide.  That's the same thing that makes sand, and sand is used to make glass.  I'm transparent like glass.  My silicon dioxide is in lumps inside me that act like prisms.  How the light strikes the lumps determines what color each lump reflects.  When I am held at a certain angle, one lump reflects red light, while the next lumps reflect green, blue, and yellow.

I'm not crystalline like a diamond, ruby, emerald, or amethyst; so I'm not monochromatic like them.  I can be all of their colors, and more.

I'm found in a lot of different rocks.  I was formed by silica being dissolved in water.  That water ended up in a crack or in a cavity in a rock.  Over millions of years all the silica-bearing water evaporated, leaving the silica behind, which became me.  Sometimes I still have a little water left inside me, which is another reason why I reflect so many different colors of light.

I sat down in a dark rock for eons until some geological process or some miner brought me out into the light where I could come to life.

Don't I look alive?

Hold me this way, and I'm blue.

Hold me that way, and I'm green

In my opinion, every other gem ought to be green--with envy--over my versatility and variability.  Who would want to be a sparkling, white diamond when they might sparkle in every color of the rainbow like me?

The Roebling Opal came out of a mine in Nevada in 1917.  It's the largest opal ever found in the United States.  It weighs over 18 ounces.  It formed in the cavity that was left after a buried tree limb had rotted away.  The cavity filled with silica-rich water, and eventually became the Roebling Opal.  It's in the National Museum of  Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Some opals have a natural fluorescence which makes them actually glow in the dark.  Do you suppose that's what the Jaredites had for light when they crossed the ocean?  And what happened to those 16 stones?  They're still out there somewhere.

The largest opal ever found is the Andamooka Desert Flame, weighing 220 ounces, or almost 14 pounds.  It was found in Australia during bulldozing operations.  It was worth over a million dollars, but was cut up into several pieces.

They say that the Andamooka Desert Flame Opal was the largest opal in the world, but they're wrong.  The largest opal is still out there, too, somewhere, waiting to be found.