Mookaite Jasper Tumbled Gemstone

Safe to handle. Mookaite is naturally colored silica with no common treatments. As with any silica stone, avoid breathing the dust when cutting or drilling it, and keep polished pieces away from harsh chemicals that can dull the surface.

Mookaite is named for Mooka Creek on Mooka Station, in the Kennedy Range of Western Australia, the only place it is found. More than 100 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, a shallow sea covered this part of Australia, and the silica skeletons of radiolaria, microscopic plankton, settled on its floor as ooze. Buried and hardened, that ooze became the Windalia Radiolarite. Iron-rich groundwater later moved through the rock and stained it red, yellow and brown, while purer layers stayed cream and white. Lapidary interest in the stone grew from the mid-20th century.

Mookaite is a silicified radiolarite, a sedimentary rock made mostly of microcrystalline silica (SiO2) in the form of chalcedony, microcrystalline quartz and opaline silica, built from the skeletons of radiolaria. It comes from the Windalia Radiolarite, an Early Cretaceous (late Aptian to early Albian) rock unit of the Carnarvon Basin. Although it is sold as a jasper, it is not a true jasper in the strict sense. Hematite gives its reds and burgundies, goethite and limonite its yellows and browns, and purer silica its creams and whites.

• Mookaite has no written ancient mythology of its own. It is named for Mooka Creek and Mooka Station in Western Australia's Kennedy Range, and mooka is often said to come from a local Aboriginal word for running waters, a nod to the springs that feed the creek.
• Collectors often retell that Aboriginal Australians knew this stone long before the lapidary trade did, shaping the region's hard silica rock into tools and honoring it as a stone of Mother Earth. These accounts come from modern crystal writing rather than recorded tradition.
• Its truest origin story is written in the rock: more than 100 million years ago, the glassy skeletons of microscopic sea plankton called radiolaria drifted down to the floor of a shallow Cretaceous sea and built the silica ooze that hardened into mookaite.