I met a traveller from an antique land... 
February 24, 2014, a 4.404 billion-year-old zircon crystal from Western Australia’s Jack Hills region is announced to be the oldest known mineral on Earth (with Earth being ~4.51 billion years old) #MineralMonday
#Minerals #Rocks #Geodes #Quartz #Iowa
Happy #MineralMonday! (Not sure if that’s a thing
).
Behold a Keokuk Geode collected by me in the sunny days of my youth!
We used to ride our bikes across the Mississippi River bridge to a small stream on the Illinois side. The geodes were in the stream and in the exposed dirt of the stream bank.
Saussurite was named after him in 1806 by his son Nicolas T. de Saussure. However, saussurite is not single mineral but a mineral aggregate which is formed as an alteration product of plagioclase feldspar #MineralMonday
by https://alexstrekeisen.it/pluto/saussurite.php
Image
January 27, 1756, birthday of Austrian musician & composer Wolfgang Amadeus #Mozart.
The mineral Mozartite - a rare metamorphic manganese silicate - is dedicated to Mozart as it was described in the Mozart-year 2006 #MineralMonday
#MineralMonday In 1774, self-taught cartographers Peter Anich and Blasius Hueber published the first map of Tyrol, including a signature showing an "alpine glacier where crystals are found."
Quartz crystals in an alpine kluft found a few years ago at Stampfl Ferner, approximately in the same area.
#MineralMonday December 22, 1719, the Italian count Von Piazza obtains the permit to search and extract "jasper and agate" from the lava rocks outcropping near the small Tyrolean town of Teis. These geodes are still known today as "Teiser Kugeln" meaning "Teis Spheres"
December 16, 1631, San Gennaro, patron of Naples, miraculously stops the lava-flows coming from Mount Vesuvius 
As a sign of divine power, in the lava appeared also cross-shaped augite crystals #MineralMonday
#MineralMonday December 9, 2017, "#StarWars: The Last Jedi" premieres, featuring in one famous battle scene what seems to be a planet covered by white sodium chloride known on Earth as halite & red potassium chloride also known as sylvite.
#MineralMonday Calcite scalenohedra from a very rare find a few years ago in the Laaser marble, Tyrol. Once considered a cheap alternative to the famous Carrara marble, the Laaser/Lasa marble has been/is used in buildings worldwide
Largest crystal face length 4cm.
#MineralMonday Characteristic dark-green epidote on fibrous chrysotile from the Knappenwand, Hohe Tauern, Austria. This historic site discovered in 1865 & (mostly) active between 1909 to 1922 provided some of the best examples of epidote crystals worldwide
Largest crystal is 3cm in length.
Grande nouvelle : le département de physique de Lyon 1 a commencé à mettre en ligne ses collections patrimoniales de minéraux (déjà plus de 6000 échantillons) et d'instruments scientifiques !
https://collectionsphysique.univ-lyon1.fr/
#patrimoine #collections #histnat #MineralMonday #mineralogie #geology #museum
#MineralMonday November 4, 1922, pharao #Tutankhamun's tomb discovered. One month later archaeologist Howard Carter will uncover a breastplate with a mysterious gemstone, still puzzling #geologists to this day as "it's not from this #earth" 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/05/19/gemstone-found-in-king-tuts-tomb-formed-when-a-meteor-collided-with-earth/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGVfxRleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHRMyL3axmT4tJ4bu2aQuFgq2LykNsB-svVWD2IJaF8Yy730mx6t1UWi4SQ_aem_wPefukPfj_DAEY54XG5eaw#7411351a6e01
#MineralMonday As of September 2024, there are 6.079 valid minerals according to the International Mineralogical Association
https://cnmnc.units.it/
Table from "Die Mineralien" (1904) showing typical crystals of sulfur, diamond, aragonite, calcite, baryte, coelestine, gypsum, apatite and fluorite
Return of the #MineralMonday photographs...
a tiny (roughly quail egg sized) thunderegg nugget that hubby cut open so i could polish the blue agate and crystal face, you can also see a white "waterline," I believe that's calcite?
#MineralMonday Here's an old image of a wonderful deep orange pyromorphite specimen from Leadhills, probably mined in the early C19th, in the collections of the Hunterian Museum at University of Glasgow. #Geology #Mineral #Pyromorphite #Leadhills #Scotland
June 17, 1832, birthday of British chemist William Crookes. In 1861 he discovered the metallic element thallium.
Hutchinsonite is one of the few #minerals incorporating thallium in its crystal structure #MineralMonday
#MineralMonday (salt is a mineral, yall)
Kolwezite, CuCo(CO3)(OH)2, Dark green layer on pink cobalt-bearing carbonates. ca 10 cm across.
Musonoi, Lualaba, RD Congo. RGM 17136. Royal Museum of Central Africa, #Belgium #MineralMonday
