MALE SPEAKER: Sunstone is the Oregon state gemstone.

It makes nice pendants, and earrings, and things like that.

And it just loves to be shiny.

EMILY: The thing that I absolutely love about sunstones is that each one is completely different.

JOHN: It's a unique gemstone.

High-end designers and cutters have won awards using Oregon sunstone.

Oh, this is just unbelievable.

JOHN: We still get a thrill every time we find a crystal.

NARRATOR: These brilliant coppery gems are only found in the state of Oregon.

They're also at the center of mystery, myth, and some misinformation.

I can see one right there.

Oh, that's nice.

NARRATOR: And for Emily Cahoon, the fascination goes even deeper.

I'm a geochemist, volcanologist, but not like Spock, and igneous petrologist.

NARRATOR: Emily studies the Picture Gorge Basalt, which is one of the Columbia River Flood Basalts.

These vast outpourings of lava from some 16 million years ago shaped much of the landscape we see today all over the Northwest, but they also contain a mystery that sent Emily's research into a completely unexpected direction.

It was in 2016 when I stumbled out to the Ponderosa Mine, and I saw these sunstones, and I was like, this is so cool.

And usually if it's cool, somebody's looked at it.

And I remember going back and digging through some literature, and was shocked to figure out we don't know how they form at the most basic level.

NARRATOR: Before we get to those mysteries, let's start with what we do know.

Sunstone is a type of mineral, labradorite, that has a little bit of copper in it.

And it can have a variety of different colors from clear to yellow, to green, red, pink.

And then depending on if you can really see those inclusions of copper and they have almost a shimmer, they call that schiller.

NARRATOR: John Woodmark and Bruce Moore have been mining sunstones here at the Ponderosa Mine since the early 2000's.

It started off as a hobby.

And then we bought this mine and it became a business.

NARRATOR: John laughs because today, the Ponderosa produces more sunstones than any other mine, by a lot.

And you don't have to dig very deep to find them.

When we dug this out, you can see sunstones from the dig.

All these white marks.

Here you go.

There's a lot here.

Just a lot.

NARRATOR: Erik Tucker would know.

He touches single stone.

After the earth is dug out, Erik runs it through a dry trammel to remove most of the dirt and concentrate the stones.

Next comes a wet trammel to clean them up a little bit more.

The rough stones are then spread out on a screen so Erik can pick out the stuff that looks good.

It's like fishing.

You never know what you're gonna get.

This one-- here's a window, which just pops like that.

NARRATOR: Once the stones are sorted, Erik runs them through a cement mixer just to scrub them up a little more.

Then the stones are graded for quality and color.

That's a terrific red.

That kind of stone will bring a lot of money per carat.

NARRATOR: The copper inside this stone gives it a value of around $2,000.

But what Emily wants to know is how did it get there in the first place?

The interesting thing with sunstones is that we don't know if the copper went in when that crystal was forming, or if maybe that copper got into the crystal at some later period.

What's interesting about this stone is you'll see copper on this side.

If you turn it on the edge, it's clear.

Wow.

This stone is pretty cool because if the copper was diffusing after the crystal formed, we wouldn't expect that color to be concentrated in the center.

We'd expect it around the rim.

So maybe the copper's in there when the crystal is actually forming.

At this stage, we actually don't know.

NARRATOR: It's a mystery.

Okay, let's tackle some of the misinformation.

When you hear that sunstones are only found in Oregon, that's mostly true.

I say mostly true because there are other flood basalt provinces around the world, and many of them have these labradorite crystals.

But the point is that they don't have copper inside them.

And it's the copper that makes Oregon sunstone really unique.

NARRATOR: Oregon sunstones are also filled with mythic significance.

They're said to possess the power of the sun, endowing those who find them with prosperity, fearlessness, and wisdom.

In this remote part of south central Oregon, sunstones are also part of an ancient story.

I've heard a wounded warrior on his way back home to his family, his blood fell on the stones and that's how they became red.

NARRATOR: John Aldrich's ancestors come from the Bear River People of Northern California.

He and his wife, Debbie, have been mining sunstones here at the Double Eagle since 2007.

Want to do some geology in the pit?

Geologizing?

[John chuckles] This is BLM land.

We possess the mineral rights.

I've always had a curiosity about the geology and I'm doing everything I can to help her with samples and stuff.

So hopefully, she can get some of the answers to questions I have myself.

We're trying to understand how the copper actually got into those crystals.

Oh yeah.

But also, when it happened.

This is potentially a sort of tuff.

And the minerals in this are different than the sunstones.

And there's different dating methods we can use.

Something that we're working on right now is not only dating the lava flows that contain the sunstones, but we can actually date the sunstones themselves.

And ages that we're getting for the sunstones are younger than the lava flows.

And that doesn't really make sense.

That's kind of funny that they're coming out younger than the flow.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

NARRATOR: Conventional wisdom says chocolate chips are already in the dough before the cookies are baked.

If so, then the chips, or in this case, the sunstones, would need to be older than the lava flow.

And right now, that's backwards.

EMILY: Do you know how the crystals are so fractured?

JOHN: Mm-hmm.

Our best working hypothesis is that when the crystals were fractured, they're actually releasing some of the gas that we use to date.

And it's giving us these younger ages.

We don't have a lot of dates, so this is very much sort of preliminary work.

But one thing we'd really like to figure out is why those ages don't make sense.

NARRATOR: Along with when and how copper gets into sunstones, Emily's also grappling with the question of why.

Copper shouldn't want to go into the mineral labradorite.

It's not something that we see really happening anywhere else in the world.

There's really no geologic environment where a metal like copper would on its own want to go into labradorite.

You can see the small pockets in there.

NARRATOR: Puzzling out sunstone's many mysteries will take Emily, well, who knows how long.

JOHN: In fact, there's one right there.

EMILY: Oh yeah, look at that.

NARRATOR: But she's not discouraged.

EMILY: That one is like the size of my fist.

JOHN: Go ahead and just wiggle it.

They're usually like teeth.

Just right out of the ground.

Gemstones are one of those things that, you know, every kid, that's kind of how you get interested in geology.

Look at that!

JOHN: Every now and then, we get lucky like this.

You know, to also be able to do that as part of research is pretty cool.

Oh, there it goes.

Now, you can see the rest of that pocket got copper schiller in it.

You can take that one if you want.

I got a bunch more for you.

Am I gonna pass the weight limit getting out of here?

JOHN: No.

You just won't bounce as much on the road going out.

That's fair, okay, okay.

[John chuckles] There's so much to learn still.

So trying to understand how sunstones fit into the volcanic history of Oregon, and the Columbia River Basalts, and also just being basically on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how a gemstone forms is incredible and just a lot of fun.