Nature's Treasures 4

Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford

Saturday, 3rd March 2012, 10.00 am.

Anglesite on iridescent gossan, Mona Mine, Parys Mountain, Anglesey; photo courtesy of R. Starkey

Registration costs £20 per person, £10 for those under sixteen years of age. For Rockwatch delegates, including parents, the cost is £10 each.

Register online or by means of this downloadable form. It is recommended that groups, including families, use the downloadable form as it is only possible to register one person at a time by online means. Members of Rockwatch, please tick the "Rockwatch" box in the form. Please contact Kevin Murphy if you have any queries about registration.

INTRODUCTION
Following on the success of Nature's Treasures meetings 1–3, this is another one-day meeting, co-organized by the Russell Society, the Mineralogical Society, Gem-A (the Gemmological Association of Great Britain), and in association with Rockwatch and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The meeting will be held on the day before the first Oxford Mineral Show for 2012.

The aim is to provide a day of talks which will appeal to anyone with an interest in minerals and gems, including members of all organizing and associated organizations. Students from schools and universities are welcomed.

The day will commence with coffee + registration at 10.00 am followed by the first talk at 10.30 am. Lunch will be followed by some displays with more talks in the afternoon.

Provisional list of speakers

Morning Session 

Session chair: Roy Starkey, President of The Russell Society

10:20 Welcome and introduction

10:30 “Re-creating 3D models of fossils” Derek Siveter, Oxford University (see http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/081022.html )

11:00 “Nuclear Waste: we have a problem” Richard Pattrick, University of Manchester

11:30 Coffee Break

11:45 “Minerals at the Nano-Scale: Exploring our Crystalline World” David Palmer Managing Director, CrystalMaker Software Ltd.  see http://www.crystalmaker.com/index.html )

12:15 Lunch and displays

Take time to view displays and demonstrations by BGS, Gem-A, The Mineralogical Society, RockWatch, The Russell Society, Richard Tayler and Andy Tindle.

12:15 Lunch and displays

Afternoon Session:

Session chair: Kevin Murphy, Executive Director of The Mineralogical Society

13:45 “Minerals, mining and mess: Cleaning up after mining for metals and coal” Bill Perkins, University of Aberystwyth

14:30 “Williams Caerhays Mineral Collection - Rescued from near-oblivion” Courtenay Smale (see http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/news/Rediscovered-mineral-collection-really-gem/article-3293937-detail/article.html and http://www.caerhays.co.uk/news.cfm?aID=8069 )

15:00 Break

15:15 “The Lore and the Profits: Gems, Myths and the Jewellery Trade over 2000 years”. Jack Ogden, Gem-A

15:45 “The wonders of volcanoes” David Pyle, Oxford University

16:15 Closing remarks

16.30 Disperse to the Museum Galleries where you can discover the stories behind Nature’s Treasures.

TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS

It is about 20 mins walk from railway station to the Museum. There is no parking available at the museum. The organisers strongly recommend that delegates use the excellent Park and Ride Services – see http://www.tourinaday.com/oxford/park-and-ride-map.php for details, downloadable maps, pricing information and more. Parking in central Oxford can be difficult and is generally expensive. If you are staying overnight in Oxford on Saturday, and attending the Mineral Show on Sunday, you may like to know that we are planning to organize an evening gathering in a pub (with food) close to the Museum on Saturday evening, so please bear this in mind when making your plans for the weekend. We will probably need to give a pre-order at lunchtime, and further details will be available on the day.

ABSTRACTS

Derek Siveter: Virtual fossils: soft-bodied sensations from the Silurian of the Welsh Borderland

Tomography, the imaging of serial planes through an object, enables capture of the internal and external morphology of three-dimensional objects, for example fossils. This may be performed through a variety of means, ranging from optical methods of serial focusing, or using scanning techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, and especially through use of X-ray computed technologies. In the case of the exceptionally preserved Silurian fossils from the Welsh Borderland (Herefordshire), numerous tomographic serial images are obtained by fine-scale grinding combined with digital photography. Each set of images then provides the basis for computer reconstruction into a three-dimensional, on-screen interactive, virtual fossil.

The Herefordshire fossils are about 425 million years old and preserved in a marine-deposited volcanic ash. They are remarkable in that not only typical shelly fossils are preserved, but also soft-bodied invertebrates, in the round, in spectacular detail. Soft-bodied fossils belonging to the earlier Cambrian Period, from deposits such as the Burgess Shale in North America, have greatly increased our knowledge of the early history of animal life relating to the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ event. However, soft-bodied faunas from the Silurian are largely unknown, and the Herefordshire fauna provides us with a previously unavailable window onto a community that lived some 90 million years later.

Derek Siveter did his BSc and PhD at the University of Leicester, a Postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin and has spent the last 24 years in Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Officially he ‘retired’ in 2011 as Curator of Geological Collections and Professor of Earth Sciences.

Richard Pattrick: Nuclear Waste: we have a problem

The debate about nuclear energy is often heated and one of the issues that is used by those who oppose it is the production of extremely radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors. But whatever our nuclear future is, we already have a legacy of the most complex radioactive wastes in the world, from our various nuclear power plants and from our nuclear weapons programmes. In 2008 the UK government decided that we would place our intermediate and high level waste in a ‘Geological Depository’ and are now actively seeking a site where a facility can be built 200-1000 m underground. Recent waste is well characterized but early wastes from nuclear activities starting in the 1950s was thrown into ponds where it lies rotting and is of unknown composition. The plan is to build a multi-barrier system that will protect the environment from the wastes for 1 million years. In each of these barriers, minerals are key. The first barrier will make the waste into a stable form, and many mineral structures are being examined. The second barrier is a stainless steel canister, perhaps packed with clay. The third is barrier is the cement that forms the underground caverns which will also be backfilled with cementitious materials. The final frontier is the rocks in which the Facility is to be built. Dealing with our current and future radioactive wastes is one of the UK’s great challenges – geologists and mineralogists will be key to meeting that that challenge.

Richard Pattrick undertook a BSc in Geology at the University of St. Andrews and a PhD in Applied Geology at the University of Strathclyde. He is a past President of the Mineralogical Society of GB and Ireland and is currently Director of the Research Centre into Radwaste and Decommissioning at the University of Manchester.

http://www.rcrd.manchester.ac.uk/

http://www.nda.gov.uk/

David Palmer: Minerals at the Nano-Scale: Exploring our Crystalline World

The beauty of natural crystals extends far beyond the polished faces of hand specimens, and into a microscopic realm of atoms and chemical bonds. These crystalline structures are highly complex, but can be understood in terms of different assemblies, or polymerisation, of chemical units: the “Lego” bricks of the mineral world.

David Palmer is a Managing Director of CrystalMaker Software Ltd, and a former research fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a former University Lecturer at the Department of Earth Sciences, The Open University.

Iain Stewart

Courtenay Smale: Williams Caerhays Mineral Collection - Rescued from near-oblivion

In the spring of 2008 Charles Williams, the owner of the Caerhays Estate, was decided that a display of the family’s minerals would be a desirable addition to the house tour at Caerhays Castle. Brought from Scorrier House to Caerhays in 1863, a large portion of the collection was presented to the British Museum (Natural History) and other museums in Cornwall in 1893 by John Charles Williams, the then owner whose interest lay in plants, not minerals.

A selection of minerals was retained by the Williams family at Caerhays and contains some of the finest known secondary arsenates and phosphates. This selection was eventually taken off display and stored in numerous locations throughout the castle, and until 2008 had not been seen in living memory.

As owners/managers of many tin and copper mines, particularly in the Gwennap parish in the late 1700s and early 1800s the Williams family were well placed to acquire the classic copper arsenates, many of which have not been bettered worldwide in 200 years. 

Later additions to the collection were made in the mid 19^th century, comprising purchases from British and European mineral dealers, including a fine thumbnail collection, commissioned from Bryce McMurdo Wright, snr. around 1860.

The current display at Caerhays is the result of the painstaking restoration of a superb collection, considered in its heyday to be one of the finest assembled in Cornwall, rivalling that of Philip Rashleigh of Menabilly.

Courtenay Smale is a graduate of the Camborne School of Mines and before retirement was a Fellow of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy. He is a Past President of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and of the Cornish Institute of Engineers. He was elected a Bard of the Gorsedd of Cornwall in 1983 in recognition of his contribution to the Mineral and Mining History of Cornwall. A schoolboy interest in worldwide minerals led to him later specialising in the Arsenates and Phosphates of Cornwall. Since June 2008, at the invitation of the owner of the Caerhays Estate, he has been working on the restoration of the famous Williams Mineral Collection at Caerhays Castle and is currently its curator.

Jack Ogden: The Lore and the Profits: Gems, Myths and the Jewellery Trade over 2000 years

For thousands of years gems and minerals have had a variety of myths, magic and medicinal properties attributed to them. Scepticism about this gem lore is not new – the Roman writer Pliny was outspoken about the ‘untruths’ regarding gems expressed in his day – and modern gemmologists typically pour scorn on such things. However closer examination shows that there can be reasons for at least some of the associated lore – some scientific, some amusing. Certain attributes associated with Gems in Medieval times can be seen to be simple misunderstandings of what classical writers were trying to say, in other cases some medical properties may indeed be based on truth. Of the apparent ‘untruths’ some were presumably those used by charlatans to sell cures, others may simply have been the exaggerated claims of those marketing jewellery – an approach that is hardly unknown today. This talk will consider some of background to the lore of gemstones in the context of 2000 years of jewellery and show that however sceptical one might be, it provides fascinating insight into gem history as well as providing a wealth of anecdotes that even the most ardent ‘non-believer’ can use to weave history and interest around the gems they are exhibiting or selling.

David Pyle

The event will also include the opportunity to talk to the speakers and others about careers in the geosciences and gemmology, and to view the several displays planned for the day: BGS, Gem-A, The Mineralogical Society, RockWatch, The Russell Society, Richard Tayler and Andy Tindle (Open University Virtual Microscope).
 

Register online or by means of this downloadable form.

The organizers are grateful for financial support from the Bassil Shippam and Alsford Trust, and from the Mineralogical Society's Special Interest Groups.