Much more common in silver than in gold, the unusual morphology know as a “wire” can resemble the finest of threads to the strongest of ropes. Although they have adorned the shelves of mineral collections for centuries, very little has been known about wire specimens until recently. Are they single crystals or bundles of many fibrous crystals? How do they grow? Some have suggested extrusion. Answers to these questions and discovery of unexpected and yet unexplained isotope compositions have resulted from our work.

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Dr. John Rakovan is a professor of mineralogy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. John received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1996 and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech before starting at Miami. He has broad research interests including crystal growth, structural and morphologic crystallography, mineral-water interface geochemistry, and mineral deposit formation.