Description

Jasper, or spotted stone, is an opaque, impure variety of Quartz that is usually red, yellow or brown in color.  Picture Jaspers simultaneously exhibit several variants such as banding, flow patterns, dendrites or color variations.  This results in what appears to be scenes or images in a cut section of the Jasper.

Dendrites are branched or tree like inclusions, usually manganese or iron oxides that are caused by irreversible aggregation of small particles forming large cluster.  Dendritic crystal growth is common and resembles a snowflake formation or frost patterns on a window.  Dendritic crystallization forms a natural fractal pattern.  The term “dendrite” comes from the Greek word dendron, which means “tree”.  It has only been in recent years that researchers have begun to understand how dendrites form and these ideas were developed by chemists and mathematicians working in disciplines called chaos and fractal geometry.  Colloidal-sized particles move in random paths in a phenomenon called Brownian motion.