Mineral art

You don't have to be a mineralogist, or even a scientist, to appreciate the art of Nature.  Nature isn't random - if you ever think it is, have a look at a snowflake, a flower, leaves on a tree, the way that crabs on a beach will pile balls of sand in concentric patterns.  The symmetry of Nature is everywhere, and it doesn't take a science degree to find it intriguing. 

I got interested in minerals at the beginning for the simple reason that they were beautiful and cool.  Nothing more than that.  In particular, in highschool I developed a distinct fondness for 'fuzzy' or acicular minerals - aegirine, elpidite, okenite, etc.  My interest in Mont Saint-Hilaire was fueled by a collector from Montreal who sold me my very first 2 inch ball of acicular, secondary aegirine.  From that point on, I was hooked, both on alkaline rocks, and on strange and wonderful habits and textures of minerals.

Sometimes you need expensive, high-powered equipment to gain a better understanding of habits and textures.  A simple dissecting binocular microscope can be enough.  If you have the facilities and the money, thin sections under a polarizing microscope will tell you so much about the mineral and rock that you can't see in hand sample.  And if you really want to get technical, a scanning electron microscope is the way to go.  Especially if you have access to a brand new JEOL which takes amazing images!

I spent the entire day taking back-scattered electron images (BSEI for you geek-types) of pyrochlore grains from the Larvik plutonic complex in Norway.  You don't need to know what a pyrochlore is (a group of oxide minerals), or even why I was imaging them (for use later when we do electron microprobe analyses), but you can appreciate the beauty of the BSEI that resulted.  All you really have to know is that the grey scale of the images is directly correlated with atomic weight of the dominant element in that area - bright areas have heavy elements like uranium, dark areas have lighter elements like silicon or sodium. 

I don't necessarily understand what some of the textures mean.  There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg approach to understanding mineral textures and, as the old saying goes - if you want 5 opinions on something, ask 5 geologists.  Everyone tends to interpret textures a bit differently. 

That said, regardless of what they mean, I think they are beautiful and want to share them.  Pyrochlore art.  Enjoy.