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All About Opals
What are Opals
Where do Opals Come From
Opal Information
Types of Opals
Is it a Real Opal?
Buy Opals
Sell Opals
White Opals
Black Opals
Boulder Opals
Opal Cutting
Opal Glossary
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Where Do Opals Come From?
 Australia is the classical Opal country and the worldwide most important supplier of Fine Opals. Almost 95 per cent of all Opals come from Australian mines. The remaining five per cent are mined in Mexico, and in Brazil's north, in the US states of Idaho and Nevada, and recently stones have also been found in Ethiopia and in the West African country of Mali.
The history of Australian Opal began actually millions of years ago, when parts of Australia were covered by a vast inland sea, and stone sediment was deposited along its shoreline. When the water masses flooded back, they flushed water containing silica into the resulting cavities and niches in the sedimentary rocks, and also the remains of plants and animals were deposited there. Slowly the silica stone transformed into Opal, for basically Opals are simply a combination of silica and water. Or, to be more precise: Opals are a gel from silica, with varying percentages of water.
In 1849 the first Opal blocks were accidentally found on an Australian cattle station called Tarravilla. The first Opal prospectors started in 1890 at White Cliff mining the Opal rocks. And even today the eyes of Opal lovers light up when somebody mentions places like White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, Andamooka or Coober Peddy: for these are the legendary sites of the Australian Opal fields. The most famous one is probably Lightning Ridge, the place where mainly the coveted Black Opal is found. Andamooka, where Crystal Opal and Light Opal are brought to the light of day, can boast to be the place where probably the largest Opal was found, with a weight of 6,843 kilograms, the "Andamooka Desert Flame". Coober Peddy, by the way, is a word from an Aborigine language meaning "white man in a hole". This clearly describes how Opal was in fact mined: many Opal prospectors made their home in deep holes or caves in the ground, to protect themselves from the burning heat of daytime and from the icy winds of night time. Usually they worked only with tools such as picks and shovels. Buckets full of soil, hopefully containing Opal rocks, were pulled up out of the depths of 5 to 40 m deep shafts by hand, for this is the depth of the Opal containing crevices and cavities, which are also mined nowadays.
Being an Opal prospector is still not an easy job, although today of course there are some technical means available, such as trucks or conveyor belts. And still the hope to make the find of a lifetime which will let you live happily ever after attracts many men and women to come to the hot and dusty Australian outback.
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