K2Ca3[(UO2)(CO3)3]2·8H2O
a strong, joyful current poured into the heart, worked at a distance
Linekite is named in honour of Dr. Allan Línek (1925–1984), a Czech physicist and crystallographer at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, recognized for his significant contributions to structure science and X-ray crystallography. The mineral was approved by the IMA (International Mineralogical Association) in November 2012 under the designation IMA2012-066, and formally described in 2017 by Plášil and colleagues in the Journal of Geosciences.
Linekite forms tabular, mostly isometric crystals up to approximately 0.5 mm across, typically occurring in multiple intergrowths. Its colour is pale olive to khaki green with a greenish white to yellowish white streak. The water content is slightly variable, ranging between 7 and 8 H2O per formula unit. As a hydrated uranyl tricarbonate, linekite belongs to a small family of minerals in which uranium is present as the linear uranyl ion (UO22+), coordinated by carbonate groups. Being very soft and hydrated, specimens should be stored in stable humidity and kept away from heat sources that could drive off structural water.
Linekite was discovered at the Geschieber vein of the Svornost Mine in Jáchymov (Joachimsthal), Karlovy Vary District, Bohemia, Czech Republic — a site with a rich history as one of Europe's great uranium mining centres. Jáchymov was the source of the pitchblende from which Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radium in 1898, and the mine complex has since produced an extraordinary range of secondary uranyl minerals as uranium-bearing groundwater interacts with post-mining residues. Linekite forms as a rare secondary phase from uranium-rich aqueous solutions in these post-mining environments. The mineral was approved by the IMA in November 2012 and formally described in 2017. No other confirmed localities are currently documented beyond the type locality in Jáchymov.
This crystal contains naturally radioactive elements and emits low-level radiation. Owning radioactive minerals may be restricted where you live — some countries regulate them strictly, with legal limits as low as 1 becquerel per gram. Check your local law before acquiring or shipping one.
All radiation safety comes down to three words: time, distance, and shielding. Handle a specimen only briefly, keep it at arm's length, and store it behind glass or lead. Enjoy it visually, or for energy work at a distance — never worn as jewellery, slept beside, or held in prolonged contact.
The chief practical risk is not the dose from the shelf but radon — a heavy radioactive gas that sinks and pools in low, unventilated spaces. Keep specimens well-ventilated, or sealed in a gas-tight container; with radon's 3.8-day half-life it never builds without limit and clears within weeks. Stored sensibly, the real dose is tiny — far below what people willingly absorb at a radon spa.
How dangerous are radioactive crystals really? Usually far less than people fear — and the science of low-dose radiation is genuinely surprising. Our full guide covers safe handling and storage, how to read a dose, the truth about radon, and the radioactive beaches and century-old healing spas where people seek radiation out on purpose.
Read the full guide →Linekite's pale olive to khaki green colour comes directly from the uranyl ion — the same chromophore responsible for the vivid greens seen across the autunite and zippeite mineral groups. The colour is subtle and earthy rather than saturated, giving specimens a quiet luminous quality in natural light.
Under ultraviolet light linekite transforms: the pale green crystals emit an intense greenish yellow glow under both short- and long-wave UV. This fluorescence is one of the most reliable diagnostic features for uranyl minerals in the field and under the collector's lamp, and makes even the tiniest linekite crystals unmistakable.
Linekite crystallises in the orthorhombic system (space group Pnnm), forming flat tabular crystals that typically interlock in complex multi-crystal intergrowths. This habit, combined with a hardness of only 2–2.5 and variable hydration, makes every intact specimen a minor mineralogical achievement.
"A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves."— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
There is a current that moves through the chest without announcement. You do not choose it; it simply arrives — warm, steady, like a lamp left burning in a room you forgot was yours. Linekite works this way. Something in it pours directly into the emotional centre, not asking whether you are ready, not waiting for the mind to decide. The heart begins to soften because the energy is already there, doing what it came to do.
The properties that characterise this stone move together: life-force flooding in, joy arriving as a natural result of that flooding, the whole field beginning to expand outward from the chest in all directions at once. Joy here is not cheerfulness or distraction. It is what remains when a blockage dissolves — the clean, spacious feeling of an issue that is simply no longer there. You are not adding something. Something is leaving. What is left, for a moment, is quiet and bright.
Power & RarityThe power reading of linekite is exceptional — among the highest in the heart-frequency range. This is not a gentle coaxing stone. It meets what is held in the chest directly and with considerable force, peeling through the emotional layers that accumulate from past hurts and unresolved encounters. The duration sits in the medium band: several hours to a day or two of sustained work, enough for root causes to surface and dissolve rather than merely having the surface symptoms eased. And because linekite is radioactive, all of this happens best at a distance. Place it across the room. Let the field do its work. The stone does not need to be in your hand to reach you.
The Quiet at the CentreThere is nothing to fix. That is the stillness linekite eventually points to. You sit with it working somewhere in the space around you, and what surfaces from the chest — old tightness, old grief, old patterns of self-withholding — comes up not because you went looking, but because the current loosened it. Who is it that holds all of this? Just look quietly. The looking itself is enough. As the emotional field clears, something in the body begins to feel larger, more connected — the expanding quality moving outward from the heart into the room, into the day. What the heart recovers, it does not keep to itself — it cannot help but pass on.
"Love is essentially self-communicative: those who do not have it catch it from those who have it."— Meher Baba