Blue Beach Glass

It seems that couple of people, my only visitors really, have arrived here after a likely fruitless attempt to find out something about beach glass by searching via yahoo.com. This amuses me. I guess that these were fruitless attempts because my site is ranked 29 and is on the third page of results. Could also be the useless blurb yahoo pulls to summarize my site. Anyway, so as to not be more deceptive than necessary, I will post some interesting links I have found regarding blue glass, beach glass, and in particular their rather natural origins.

By the Sea Jewelery answers some frequently asked questions about beach glass.

Susan Hampton describes "Glass Making in Antiquity". In particular, "For blue glass add cobalt, for red glass add copper or gold dust."

Miller and Faye describe a different kind of naturally occurring blue "glass" in their paper, ""Blue Dragon" Basalt from Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho: Origin of Color" from Volume 58, pages 1048-1051, 1973 of American Mineralogist.

"The unusual color of the "Blue Dragon" lava is due to intense blue light being reflected from clusters of tiny titanian magnetite crystals, which, together with crystallites of plagioclase and olivine, are dispersed throughout an outer layer of clear brown glass. It is proposed that Fe2+→ Fe3+, and probably Fe2+→ Ti4+, electron transfer processes are responsible for the blue color."

P.S. - I wonder if this post will muddy yahoos search waters further and bump up my ranking. Bah! Silliness.