tuff - teaching hand specimen of a very pure lithified white volcanic ash

Description

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Hand specimen of a very pure, slightly lithified, white pumicite volcanic ash
This pumicite tuff was mined for years in Last Chance Canyon in Kern County, California as the scouring agent in Old Dutch Cleanser. It is a pure volcanic ash with no included clasts, is not very dense, and will rub off on student's fingers. It looks just like a block of solidified scouring powder. It is similar to diatomaceous earth in appearance, though more dense than the diatomite.
In 1905, Cudahy Packing Company was the first company to market scouring powder, originally sourced from a mine in Kansas. They began operations at the Last Chance Canyon mine in 1923. Twelve men were employed to produce 100 tons of pumicite per week. Ore initially was lowered 475 feet down a rail tramway to loading bins in Last Chance Canyon. From there it was trucked seven miles south to a Southern Pacific siding at Saltdale, where it was loaded on rail cars for delivery to Los Angeles.
The mine produced 120,000 tons of pumicite before it was closed in 1947. That's a lot of cleanser.
Many tuffs contain angular clasts (from the Greek
klastos
=
broken
) - fragments of other rocks welded in. As the ash was being blasted out of the vent, fragments of the surrounding rocks were being torn loose and blasted out with it. Angular clasts make a tuff easy to separate from a rhyolite, a lava with the same composition as tuff or granite. The rhyolite is entirely crystalline, though the crystals are often difficult to see without a 10x lens. In this case, an ash has to be identified by its gritty feel and not by included angular clasts.
Students should see a variety of tuffs. Tuffs are extremely variable, though most are relatively light in color and relatively light in weight. They should be able to tell you where the included angular clasts came from, and should use the presence of clasts to separate a tuff from a rhyolite.
These specimens will fit into a 3.5” x 5.25" specimen tray. We include data with every specimen: collecting locality for mineral specimens and for rocks also the formation and age, if determined.
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You can select a specimen by telling us what is in front of it - a black mechanical pencil, a silver and black pen, a silver and blue pen, or one of those plus some number of coins, or you can let us make the selection.
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