Earlier in the Summer on a trip to Kure Beach, North Carolina, I just happened to find a small piece of copper in the Coquina Rocks. In a nutshell, the Coquina Rocks are essentially a partially submerged outcrop of sedimentary rocks found near the southern end of Kure Beach near the Fort Fisher Recreational Area. More on Coquina Rocks later…
I was walking along, carefully maneuvering through the Coquina Rocks during during Maximum Ebb Tide this one day. Many people apparently scout the micro-lagoons formed in the cracks and crevasses of the rocks during Low Tide looking for sharks teeth. I really don’t care for sharks, let alone their teeth but these people do. I looked down and saw a gold-red glint with a hint of bright green. Below are some photographs of what I found:
The rule is for scale. It is a standard engineer rule with 1/10th-inch graduations. What is the green stuff? Well that would be considered a marine concretion. First, the environment here is [or has been] oxygenated enough that copper and copper alloys would corrode and oxidize. Chemically unweathered copper is a golden, reddish-brown in most cases. An oxidized copper surface is usually black . . . → Read More: Marine Concretion on a Copper Fragment
