Geo-Mysteries @ The Children's Museum of Indianapolis

$Golden cube fractures$ Cleavage and Fracture
Our golden cube looks like it would cleave into perfect cubes, just like galena.

But the shape of a mineral does not always tell us how it will break. If we split the golden cube, we'd find that it actually does not cleave at all. Instead, it fractures into shell-like pieces—just like quartz!

Gold doesn't cleave either—but it's such a soft mineral that you can't fracture it either. It bends rather than breaks.

So our golden cube fractures, while gold neither fractures nor cleaves, but simply bends.

Time to test another mineral property!