The Earth Story

For this #mineralmonday take a visit to the collection of the Peabody Mineral Museum at Yale, and head behind the scenes just before this exhibit closes for a renovation.

Jack Halpern is a famous, 100 year old mineral collector in San Francisco. His collection is, well, legendary. Take a look!

Amazonite and Smoky Quartz This gem quality piece comes from the collection of Jack Halpern, famed mineral collector from San Francisco. The light blue minerals are the gemstone amazonite, a type of the mineral microcline, while the darkened, burned minerals are smoky quartz.

Tour a full Fossil collection! Who has a better one in their house? Show off in the comments

Painite, as rare as it gets.

Boron minerals are often chemically complex grab bags, with many different ions able to insert themselves into the crystal structure and join in the fun of making crystals if they are present in the mother ichor (the last water rich phase of crystallising granites, the composition depends on which elements that particular granite distilled out of the Earth). The tourmaline family is a common example, with a bewildering array of different varieties (see Part 1: http://on.fb.me/16RpPdC and Part 2: http://on.fb.me/1KzJhtK). Painite is a very rare example, containing calcium, zirconium, boron, aluminium along with whiffs of chromium and vanadium, and is a crowning peak to any collection.

First discovered in Burma by a British mineralogist (and gem dealer, after whom the mineral was named), its usual colour is a red to orange induced by impurities of iron. Well formed crystals are hexagonal, like quartz, and as of 2004 only two are known to have been faceted. Before 2005 only 25 crystals were known, though recent finds in Burma have made it a bit less scarce as they have been vigorously mined. Several thousand specimens now exist outside their customary home in the bowels of the Earth. Until recently they were practically unknown outside museum or gemmological research collections. They are found in low silica metamorphic rocks, but not much more is known about the geology of the deposit.

Loz

http://www.mindat.org/min-3063.html http://webmineral.com/data/Painite.shtml#.VNKNSC6m0S4 http://www.gemdat.org/gem-3063.html http://www.minsocam.org/ammin/AM61/AM61_88.pdf