Cavorite

Color and Luster: Banded green to green-black mineral, medium luster, with an active, shifting banded pattern.
Hardness: 5-6
Cleavage: None
Fracture: Conchoidal
Formation: Globular masses ranging in size from 2cm to 1.5 meters. Larger masses have been found at sub-bedrock depths in Caledon Moors as well as with the floating mountain-mass in Caledon Morgaine
Cavorite, named for Dr. Cavor, was first found in Caledon Moors in 1884. After a number of scientific exhibitions, Cavorite was soon a staple of the airship industry, finding widespread use use where turbines, and heated or volatile gasses are impractical at best. Cavorite is actively mined from primarily one location: Caledon's Cavorite Mines.
After the mine in the Moors was well established, a second Cavorite deposit was discovered in Caledon Morgaine. This discovery was made when a mountain suddenly rose into the air, leaving behind a water channel with a mound of stone hovering over it. The mountain was found to have been sitting on a bed of Cavorite, which lifted the entire formation into the air. This deposit has not been commercially exploited, due to the numerous houses and buildings in the area.
A recent increase in foreign demand for the mineral, fueled by a demand for "Bling," has led to an increase in smuggling activity and a rise in black market prices.
From information provided by Horg Neurocam, of the Mineralogical Society:
The object of Mr. Cavor’s search was a substance that should be “opaque “—he used some other word I have forgotten, but “opaque” conveys the idea—to “all forms of radiant energy.” “Radiant energy,” he made me understand, was anything like light or heat, or those Rontgen Rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of Marconi, or gravitation. All these things, he said, radiate out from centres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term “radiant energy.” 
Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light, but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and alum is transparent to light, but blocks heat completely. A solution of iodine in carbon bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks light, but is quite transparent to heat. It will hide a fire from you, but permit all its warmth to reach you. Metals are not only opaque to light and heat, but also to electrical energy, which passes through both iodine solution and glass almost as though they were not interposed. And so on.
Now all known substances are “transparent” to gravitation. You can use screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical influence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you can screen things by sheets of metal from Marconi’s rays, but nothing will cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to say. 
Cavor did not see why such a substance should not exist, and certainly I could not tell him. I had never thought of such a possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. (first published by H.G. Wells in his somewhat fictionalized account "The First Men in the Moon")
Category:GeographyCategory:Nature