about Treasure
Ask: Tell me about gems!
Pirate Pete: Gems are those big colored things in sparkly jewelry.
Ask: Where can I get some?
Pete: I used to steal them from treasure ships. But people shoot at you! It’s really dangerous! Then I thought, why go to all that trouble when you can just get them right out of the earth? So I became a geologist.
Ask: Do you have a treasure map?
The best kind! It’s made of rocks! Gems form deep under the earth, where it’s hot and crushing enough to melt minerals (the ingredients of rocks) into lovely hard gems. Then over millions of years, Earth scrunches up mountains or squeezes up magma, and brings the gems up rocks. So the real trick is to tell which rocks are the good ones.