DELAWARE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE HONORS PROJECT: ANALYZING FLUID AND CRYSTALS IN FLUID FILLED AGATES

For our honors project this semester at Delaware County Community College, we studied agates by cutting them open and observing the contents. The agates we obtained were natural specimens with naturally occurring liquid inside of them. We wanted to see what was in the liquid, so first we drilled a hole in each of the seven agates. Once the hole was deep enough to penetrate, we extracted the fluid with a needle and put the samples of fluid in vials. The vials were then sent to the Biology lab of Delaware County Community College, where it was determined that no microbial life were present in the liquids. Next, we wanted to determine the composition of the crystals within the agates. We took the agates to West Chester University to cut off specific areas of interest and, once the areas of interest were separated, we evaluated with an electron microscope. Using the Electron Microscope’s X-Ray diffraction feature, we determined that most of the black crystals within the samples we saw were made of Manganese. Thus, we concluded that the crystals we observed within all seven of our samples were composed mostly of Quartz and Manganese.