Physics of the South Pacific - Part 1

This place is just rolling in physics.  The most important physics is that of the pearl.  It is formed by secretions that build up the whole oyster shell.  There are many varieties of oyster, but only a few create the ‘Mother of Pearl’.  There are many myths of pearl creation, and I remember many of them, that I have learned over the ages.  Like all popular myths, most of them are garbage.

Oysters are filter feeders with big ‘lips’ to do the filtering.  These lips are the part that builds up the shell, to create a big oyster from a small one.  With a pearl oyster, the inside is beautiful, and was the main jewelry decoration for the ancient people.  The spherical pearl is a modern innovation from Japan.  It is nearly impossible to form a natural pearl, since the lips lay down a line.  The garbage is that a natural pearl comes from a grain of sand.  That doesn’t happen.

The process of the cultured pearl starts with examining tons of oysters.  They can only open them an inch with clamps and look inside.  If the inside has a beautiful mother of pearl, then the poor bugger is sacrificed.  They chop up the lips into tiny 2x2 mm pieces, and get about 50 pieces.  A good donor is very rare.

Then they take a machined ball-bearing from Japan, made from Mississippi freshwater mussels.  People eat the mussels and save them for Japan to buy.  They have a ball-bearing process (super secret) that creates perfect spheres of various sizes.  They have also sewn up the entire supply.  The Tahiti pearl people buy sacks of them at 50 bucks a pop for about 100 blanks.  

Then the fun.  They open the ordinary bland oysters, and cut a little slit into the egg sack.  They are like worms, hermanphrodites, but they probably accept other sperm and reject their own.  Then they put in the blank along with a tiny piece of lip from the donor.  The lip is alive and is happy attaching itself to the blank, and growing all around, forming a sack to protect itself.  Over a year and a half later, it is ready.  They carefully cut into the egg sack again, after checking if there are eggs.  If there are, then they put the oyster into the colder water, and it releases.  Baby oysters are free-floating plankon, until they attach to ropes and nets.  They take these and raise the babies on ropes.

Once the oyster is empty, they cut into the egg sack again, and then into the tumour of lip.  Out comes the pearl.  Only 30% are sellable.  Then in goes a new blank.  And the circle of life …  They can do this for about 5 times, then it’s into the pot.  It takes years to grow a matched pearl necklace.  Perfect champaign pearls and necklace cost $5K.

This could be ridiculously easy for a vapour deposition process fo make pearls, but we may wait a few years.

There is a huge process of sorting the pearls and then they have to ship them to the big city to certify.  They have to have a thickness of the nacre of about .8 mm.  False pearls would have a very thin plating and instantly be destroyed once you put them on.  Only buy the certified ones.

We got some very nice single-pearl earrings for about $300 US bucks.  Very distinctive.