Garnet, the Least Flashy of Our Minerals

The third mineral among the main targets of our excavation project is garnet, defined in Wikipedia as “a group of minerals that have been used since the Bronze Age as gemstones and abrasives.”

The garnet we are finding in the black sands of the Oregon coast has no doubt been there for centuries, naturally crushed and ground to a fine grain. Like zircon, garnet comes in a variety of colors including red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, just to name a few. The garnet we are finding along the Oregon coast is reddish orange in color, one of the most common of the mineral’s colors.

While this is high-quality, high-value garnet, it’s the least glamorous of the minerals we are collecting. Its fine-grain, very hard composition probably means its best use is for high-precision water jet cutting, maybe even for aerospace applications. Water jet machines are typically used to cut things like granite or metal, anywhere you need to cut a variety of materials without generating a lot of heat. It’s also used for optical lens grinding and plate glass grinding.

Water jet machines use very small volumes of water mixed with an abrasive like garnet and specialized pumps that can generate pressure exceeding 50,000 pounds per square inch. The result is a laser-like stream of high-pressure material that can cut through such things as steel or aluminum. The use of garnet in precision water jet cutting is expanding and the domestic U.S. market is expected to increase for the next several years.

Our job here is relatively simple: to gather it, put it in a bag and sell it, mostly to local sources along the West Coast, from the Pacific Northwest down to Los Angeles.