FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Elise]

Hi All,

“Shades of Blue Minerals,” the January/February issue of Rocks & Minerals magazine, has recently been posted online and the glossy hardcopy is soon to follow via snailmail, just in time for the ramp-up to the 2016 Tucson Gem & Mineral Show of the same theme! I’m thrilled to have been invited to write about the mechanisms of color for this special issue, and hope the somewhat different approach to this topic will be helpful to those interested in minerals and gems. Nearly a year in genesis, the article is aimed at a wide-range of interest levels and backgrounds. It’s also the first in a series of popular science articles focused on optical mineralogy and crystallography; the next two already-completed installments will come out very soon.

On-going collaboration with Cornell’s Professor Emeritus William A. Bassett is truly priceless to me for this and other projects in the wings, as well as for those over the past eight years of work and research together. Bill shares my enthusiasm for exploring the fascinating aspects of this classical science, and as my co-author he sets the highest bar for accuracy. I’m so honored that these efforts have resulted in this article being included in such a fine publication as Rocks & Minerals, a cross-discipline geological periodical chock-full of diverse topics. R&M has one of the toughest editorial review boards in the mineral world, as well as a community of some of the most engaging writers of the genre. As to why some minerals (and feathers) are brilliant blue when light falls upon them yet in transmitted light are revealed to be colorless, see “Blue Minerals: Exploring Cause & Effect.” Abstract: https://www.rocksandminerals.org/Back%20Issues/2016/January-February%202016/blue-minerals-exploring_abstract.html (link normalized by FMF)

Skalwold, E.A. and W.A. Bassett. (2016) Blue minerals: exploring cause & effect. Rocks & Minerals, Vol.91, No.1, pages 61-75.

I would love to hear any comments and any discussion it generates on other aspects of Optical Mineralogy and Crystallography.

Best wishes,
Elise

[Elise]

Short on the heels of the blue minerals paper, the Mineralogical Society of America published two more papers in what might be considered a "series," this time in the form of booklets, now freely accessible on the MSA website as both print quality PDFs and reduced size PDFs for on-screen viewing:
https://www.minsocam.org/msa/openaccess_publications/#Skalwold_01
(link normalized by FMF)
There will be some hardcopies available at the MSA booth at the TGMS as well.

Both papers have been "brewing" for several years and I'm thrilled the MSA offered to publish them! I'm hoping Jordi will remember the calcite prisms featured in the "Double Trouble: Navigating Birefringence" paper. The "Quartz: a Bull’s Eye on Optical Activity" features a quartz monochromator designed by Dr. Hurlbut at Harvard which I hope all will find as fascinating as I did.

Best wishes for the New Year,
Elise

[Bob Carnein]

Nice! Thanks for making these so readily available.

[nicu]

Elise,

All our gratitude for this noble sharing of MSA Publications.
I will propose to download them to electronic Geology/Mineralogy database of Central University Library ''Carol I'' of Bucharest.

Thank you !
Lovely New Year Holidays,

Nicu Pascanu

[Elise]

I hope the Viking context of the birefringence paper will make for a fun read and that the two papers are helpful to wide range of interest levels and geological specialties. Also, much of the material in both papers is not presented in any one paper or book elsewhere (or is even not presented at all), so we hope to fill in the gaps and facillitate study of textbooks and other literature by these efforts. I have had some very nice feedback and helpful comments which I've been collecting in a folder. The following was from my friend Richard W. Hughes who has written hundreds of papers and several books:

[Elise]