Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    Once Upon a Gemstone

    by Adrienne Berard Feb 20, 2014 4 minutes

    For longer than recorded history, gemstones have been used to tell stories. Passed down through generations, they carry the legends of our ancestral past. They also carry with them a much, much older history: the geological echoes of our planet’s very formation. As shifts deep within the Earth’s core drove its tectonic plates, compression, heat, and chemical reactions created a new set of minerals, beautiful to the human eye. Understanding that these were objects of record, of permanence, humans wove their own, new stories around them, making meaning from mystery.

    Peridot of the splitting sea

    The island of Zabargad in the Red Sea has been home to the world’s finest specimens of peridot for as long as 3,500 years, since its

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus5 min read
    I Never Stopped Learning from Daniel Dennett
    They say, never meet your heroes. Daniel Dennett, who was exceptional in so many ways, and who died last month, was for me an exception to this rule, too. Like so many, I was first inspired by Dennett on reading one of his many bestsellers: Conscious
    Nautilus7 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
    The Soviet Rebel of Music
    On a summer evening in 1959, as the sun dipped below the horizon of the Moscow skyline, Rudolf Zaripov was ensconced in a modest dormitory at Moscow State University. Zaripov had just defended his Ph.D. in physics at Rostov University in southern Rus
    Nautilus3 min read
    The Curious Life of a Singing Fish
    The world of larval plainfin midshipman fish may look alien, but it could be as close as the cobbles beneath your feet, if you walk the rocky shores found along much of the North American West Coast. Adults of this species swim each spring from the o

    Related Books & Audiobooks