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Quartz has long been related to the New Age circles, holistic health and now the most recent innovation of holistic jewelry.

Quartz remains a major element in today's technological and information revolution, because it is an excellent receptor and emitter of electromagnetic waves.  The natural crystal has a very even arrangement of atoms which vibrate at a very steady frequency.

The conversion of quartz crystals into silicon chips has completely altered our world, bringing the digital age into a reality. Quartz has given us computers, mobile phones and communication breakthroughs, producing a whole new universe of virtual reality.

It was Marcel Vogel, Nobel-prize winning scientist, who discovered that not only could quartz crystals be programmed as silicon chips in a computer. He believed that quartz could be programmed through thought. Information is saved on the computer's silicon chips through the use of an electrical current.

Most of the universes silicon chips that are used in all computers have been created by using grey quartz. This quartz is made into CD-sized wafers, the mineral allowing it to be engraved with electronic circuitry.

Fifty years ago high quality quartz was being disposed of as rubbish. It is now sold for $50,000 a tonne. Unimin Mine, in Spruce Pine, Silicon Valley, North Carolina, is the only region on the globe where this ultra-pure mineral is to be found. This make is among one of the highest priorities for nuclear attack in the U.S.

How one of the main mining corporations of the area, Unimin, extracts the quartz from the mountainside is a highly guarded secret. The mine and plants are carefully guarded by security guards, gates and cameras and no staff from the mine are allowed to speak to people outside the company.

Reaching down the entire side of the mountain in tiers of rock, the quartz mines appear huge, when seen in aerial photographs.

"It's the most valuable strategic square acreage on the planet," said sixty-eight-year-old Ira Thomas, a ninth-generation miner who used to dig up aquamarines and prospect for mica as a kid, but now works for Unimin mine. Because the world runs on computers, we all know that now. And if we locked the gates to Mitchell County they could not make any more computers."

Technology which involves the quartz chip, utilizes a new multi-core chip that packs 820 million of very small switches (just 45 nanometres billionths of a metre) wide into a region, no larger than a postage stamp. Bill Kircos from Intel said Fifteen to 20 years ago the same chip would have been about the size of a two-storey building.

At this point in time Unimins position in the industry is a certainty, as synthetic quartz is economically too expensive to replace Spruce Pine's high-purity mineral.