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THIS UPDATE: MAY 2003

That eight months have passed since our previous What's New installment on these pages should serve as some indication of how busy things have been around the museum. In this update we emphasize events rather than specimens. In a later (and hopefully not far distant) offering we hope to include photographs of specimens recently acquired and discuss progress in constructing new exhibits. Stay tuned—we are still here, even if sometimes it does not appear so.

Warren Museum on the Move

Four museum staff members—Maureen and Dr. Earl Verbeek, Dick Bostwick, and Tema Hecht—repeatedly found themselves in the role of roving ambassadors for the Warren Museum during the last half of 2002 and early 2003. Here is a summary of the major events:

Fluorescent Mineral Society Meeting

First on the agenda was the annual meeting of the Northwest Region of the Fluorescent Mineral Society, held this year at the home of Don and Elsie Friend of Olympia, Washington. Picture yourself surrounded by wonderful food, minerals, and like-minded people and you'll have an idea what this day was all about. It was educational as well, for FMS members are an inquisitive lot, and quite a few of them came prepared with specimens and knowledge to share. Although nearly a continent away, these folks are strong supporters of the Warren Museum and have earned our enduring respect and gratitude.

Denver Gem and Mineral Show

The Denver Gem and Mineral Show, one of the nation's finest, is held every year in the Exposition Hall of the Denver Merchandise Mart, not far from the historic downtown area. As in past years the Sterling Hill Mining Museum was an invited exhibitor, but this year we departed from tradition and put in a case of fluorescent minerals from the Warren Museum. The organizers of the Denver show have done a marvelous job of expanding their fluorescent show exhibits, and this year eight cases of fine specimens were on public view. The show gave us an opportunity to meet several "movers and shakers" on the fluorescent scene for the first time.

Electric Ladyland

The next visit was overseas, to Amsterdam, where Nick Padalino and Michelle Delage preside over Electric Ladyland, "The First Museum of Fluorescent Art." Imagine, if you will, a place with no conventional lighting—just dozens upon dozens of fluorescent paintings, photographs, and evocative three-dimensional scenes, all glowing brightly under the longwave ultraviolet lights hung overhead. Nick and Michelle are artists, and Nick even makes his own fluorescent paints and printing inks. A virtual trip to the Electric Ladyland website (www.electric-lady-land.com) is well worth the time, but please realize that the phosphors in your computer monitor cannot begin to duplicate the colors you would see in person.

Mineralogical Club of Antwerp

A meeting of the MKA, the Mineralogical Club of Antwerp, took two of us from the Netherlands to Belgium. The MKA is one of those increasingly rare gems, a club with an ambitious slate of field trips, lectures, and workshops, and with members more attuned to collecting mineralogical knowledge than the next "bragging rock.." These folks are serious about minerals, as a visit to their web site (www.minerant.org) will quickly affirm. Through fortunate circumstance this particular meeting featured a presentation by Gérard Barmarin on The History of Fluorescence, and there was time before and after the meeting to view the extensive fluorescent-mineral collections of Axel Emmermann and Piet Van Hool, both of whom have specimens from localities rarely represented in stateside collections. The MKA and the Warren Museum will maintain close contact in the future and will exchange both information and specimens to our mutual benefit.

Carnegie Mineral Show

November saw two of us on the road again, this time with a trunk full of fluorescent minerals to place on display at the Carnegie show in Pittsburgh. We chose manganese-activated minerals as the display theme to showcase one of the educational exhibits of the museum. This proved a fortunate choice, for the display area was not fully darkened, yet the specimens still glowed brightly. The Carnegie show, held this year in the elegant foyer of the Music Hall, has rapidly developed into an important "place to be and be seen." Accordingly, our staff members diligently grazed and thoroughly imbibed their way through every social event offered.

Local shows

There were local events too, of course: the Franklin Mineral Show in September and the all-fluorescent Ultraviolation 2002 in October. At both shows the Warren Museum installed a display case of orange-fluorescent minerals in honor of Halloween, and at both shows, too, some important new acquisitions were made for the museum's reference collection.

Tucson Gem and Mineral Show

Our ambassadors to this show shipped enough minerals to Tucson to install two display cases in the "main show" at the Convention Center. One case featured fluorescent minerals of Franklin and Sterling Hill, and the second contained worldwide fluorescent minerals. The Tucson show is the world's largest, and to be an invited exhibitor is a considerable honor. During the show there was a meeting of the Fluorescent Mineral Society, attended by members from all over the country. President Rod Burroughs presented a $500 check to the Warren Museum to help fund the museum's new room, tentatively scheduled for opening later this year.

Society of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers

The SME show, held this year in Cincinnati, is an extravaganza of mining and mineral-processing equipment. With thousands of mining engineers, mine owners, and geologists in attendance, the SME show presents a wonderful opportunity to spend time with people active in the mining industry and to forge cooperative efforts between our museum and companies interested in public education on natural resource issues. Several promising leads from this show may well result in future exhibits at the museum.

Super Science Saturday

The Warren Museum and the Franklin Mineral Museum once again teamed up this year to provide displays of fluorescent minerals for the annual Super Science Saturday event at the Franklin Elementary School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. This event brings together participants in all walks of science: electronics, mineralogy, paleontology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, biology, and more. A constant stream of visitors to our room reassured us, as before, that this was a Saturday well spent.

Rochester Symposium

The combined mineral show and symposium held every year in Rochester, New York, is surely one of the nation's most important events for dedicated mineral collectors who wish to expand their knowledge as well as their collections. Although we brought no minerals to this show, Jacques Poulin and Gilles Haineault teamed up to ensure that we would return to New Jersey with a boxload of them, all from Mont Saint-Hilaire. Jacques went through the entire specimen stock of Gilles Haineault to select specimens for the museum's consideration, and we leapt upon these with blinding speed. Included in this lot were fine specimens of fluorescent willemite, quartz(!), genthelvite, lorenzenite, elpidite, polylithionite, and leucophanite. A permanent exhibit featuring the fluorescent minerals of Mont Saint-Hilaire is surely in the museum's future, and Jacques and Gilles have provided us a firm foundation upon which to build.

 

More from Greenland

Mark Cole (MinerShop, Miami, Florida) is doing his best to ensure that a significant portion of Greenland's continental crust finds a new home in Ogdensburg. Five more specimens from his latest shipment from the Ilimaussaq complex have found their way to the Warren Museum, including a large (bordering on huge) tugtupite from the Taseq slope, a specimen of exceedingly coarse-grained sodalite showing prominently zoned fluorescence, and other goodies you'll have to come to the museum to view. With Mark's help we are well on our way to having enough specimens to mount a permanent display on the fluorescent minerals of this wonderful region. This display, as normal for the Warren Museum, will be educational, with information on the gas content of silica-undersaturated magmas and its relation to the fluorescence of the minerals that crystallize from them. Much information on the Ilimaussaq complex is posted on Mark's website, www.minershop.com.

The Columbia space shuttle

We end this installment on a sad but nevertheless heartening note. Virtually everyone who reads this knows of the loss of seven crew members on the NASA space shuttle Columbia as it fragmented high in the atmosphere on February 1. This was the mission that included samples for the Ogdensburg Glowing Rocks Experiment (OGRE), descriptions of which appeared in the previous installment on this web site. The Warren Museum served as science advisor to the Ogdensburg school students for this experiment. To date we do not know if any of the minerals were recovered or if they will be returned to the school. That, however, matters little. The real story lies in the reaction of the children to the shuttle tragedy: rather than even mention their personal loss, they focused instead on the other children who had just lost a parent. On March 11 they gathered at the Warren Museum to prepare fourteen sets of fluorescent minerals, one for each child of the Columbia families, as a remembrance of one of the experiments aboard the shuttle. As before, the students did nearly all of the work themselves: they washed rocks, used hammers and chisels to bludgeon large rocks into samples of manageable size, and sorted through hundreds of specimens to prepare fourteen sets of eleven specimens each. This was a shared effort: the Franklin Mineral Museum contributed fourteen ultraviolet lights, the Warren Museum the 151 specimens, and the Ogdensburg students the emotion and labor to turn a loving thought into reality.

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