Wonder what the largest naturally-occurring pyrite cube is, hypothetically speaking. Like is there an upper limit on size or are borg cubes grown and then hollowed out?
Given ridiculously perfect conditions, I don’t think there’s any (reasonable) upper limit on how big a pyrite cube could grow.
There are certainly limits on how big one could grow in real life conditions, but those are always fluctuating, and who knows when conditions might randomly become just right for an even bigger cube…
At any rate, you’d eventually be limited by your supply of iron and sulfur, I suppose, if nothing else.
There’s probably an upper bound imposed by self gravity at some point, but I don’t feel like doing math today
Yuge cubes
Call me a fool, but I like this more than gold.
I swear nature is just fucking with us when it comes to pyrite
Resistance is futile
And bismuth
Bismuth rocks.
Any reason why they form this way?
Someone built a portal in the Minecraft dimension to throw a few over to us. /j
I think that’s because they are square at the molecular level, they grow in the same shape
me when i load up blender
These are the cubes you murdered just to make a cube.
Freaky that those are natural
It’s amazing that they’re all exactly the same size.
Are we look at the same picture?
It’s a matter of perspective.
They’re selected for this because they’re all near-perfect cubes.
There’s a bag of ‘uglies’ under the table that look more like the one on the right embedded in the quartz(?).
Still amazing though.
Time for me to add my tiny bit of semi related, but useless, knowledge : Galena can also form in cube shapes.
The only reason I know this is because we were crawling around in some old mines in the Ozarks and back in a little offshoot I found a few small, dark cubes in the dirt so I asked some of the geologists with us. Turns out the small mines were there specifically to pull out galena.
From wikipedia :
Galena, also called lead glance, is the natural mineral form of lead(II) sulfide (PbS). It is the most important ore of lead and an important source of silver.
Also, don’t go crawling around in mines from the 1800s, it’s likely a bad idea.
This is a Doctor Who plot before the reveal.
Resistance is futile
Someone tossed a pyrite house from monopoly in there as a goof.
And the old saying is “there are no straight lines in nature.”
![[OC] Naturally occurring pyrite cubes](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c649706d-1588-4aa0-b787-67215491afa1.jpeg){kind=link}