Day 52 : With the garden under three inches of snow, here is one of rocks just outside my front door. It is a psammite with a nice fold in it. I cannot recall the provenance, other than it is probably Scottish.
Day 51 : Today was an open day at Keele, so here is one of our samples out on display. The mineral sample is mainly galena with pink fluorite crystals and white quartz.
Day 50 : Another rock from the Boulby Mine, this time it is the Billingham Main Anhydrite. Anhydrite, calcium sulphate (CaSO4) is an essential raw material in the manufacture of sulphuric acid and ammonium sulphate fertiliser. Principally mined at Billingham in the 1960s, the ICI complex, of which the mine was …
Day 49 : The more classical cubic crystals of the Boulby Halite.
Day 48 : Another sample from my boxed set of Boulby Mine rock and mineral specimens. This time it is the sodium chloride mineral halite, nicely showing some mineral cleavage faces.
Day 47 : Continuing the series from the Cleveland Potash mine at Boulby, this is the mineral sylvite (potassium chloride). It is one on the last minerals to form from evaporation of a sea water solution.
Day 46 : This week I’ll concentrate on samples from the Cleveland Potash mine at Boulby, North Yorkshire. This is the Boulby Potash. It comes in two forms, a clean ore and a shaly ore, the ‘ore’ in question being sylvinite (a mixture of sylvite KCl and halite NaCl). Close …
Day 45 : These little critters are supposed to be microfossils but they are up to 1 cm across in this sample. They are nummulites (literally “little coins”), a type of foraminifera. This nummulitic limestone is from the Tertiary of the Spanish Pyrenees.
Day 44 : Dreikanter is German for “three sides”. This gabbro ventifact is a classic dreikanter, sculpted by wind blown sand to produce a three-sided pyramid shape. I brought this sample which is about 25cm across back from the Atacama Desert of Chile.
Day 43 : Today I had meetings to attend at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, one in the geological Society, the other in the Royal Astronomical Society across the courtyard. Not much time to take a Rock365 picture, so hurriedly taken with my iPhone (with apologies for the picture quality) is …