Welcome to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County mineral exhibit at the 2024 Tucson Gem and mineral show. I hope you find this to be an immersive and captivating Museum exhibit that unveils the remarkable Beauty and diversity of minerals that lie beneath the surface of our planet. Step into a world where vibrant color, intricate crystal formations, and geologic wonders converge to tell a story of Earth's geological history and crystals that have been meticulously extracted, each with its own story to tell. The specimens, in this case, take you from the south to the north from Ramona, California, where you have the little three mine and Associated dikes, where a lot of garnet and schorl and clevlandite have been recovered, as well as topaz. And all the way to the North in Riverside County at the Jensen Quarry, which is now a golf course.
Almost all of these specimens have been donated to the museum by generous benefactors, most recently by Jeffrey Kent, who was a big donor in this particular case where 11 specimens are from his collection now in the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Of course, everybody's favorite specimen is subject to personal preferences and biases. In this particular case, some of my favorites happen to be the really nice Morganite from the blue lady mine, the school just to the bottom right of it from the Jensen Quarry, and I love that crystal; it's a really, really unique crystal form. And then on the left side of the case, we have the little three mine crystals, the spessartine garnets, the topaz, and lepidolite are all extremely fine specimens. And probably the top of the list might be the Stewart collection right in the front of the case these bubblegum pink crystals are absolutely phenomenal.
We are also doing research with these minerals. I'm going to play next a snippet of an interview I did with Carol Woolton from the podcast "If Gems Could Talk," and in there, I discussed some of the research that we're doing with minerals and gemstones.
Carol-- positive economically for people
Aaron-- yeah so gemstones are extremely stable materials, that's why we use them in jewelry they're hard, they're resistant to weathering, they're resistant to damage, and there are some gemstones that you can put into a liquid, for example, benitoite that is a rare kind of gemstone but beautiful blue color only grows in California um and it it's a barium silicate mineral but we're working on ways of removing the barium from the Crystal from the gem and replacing it with lead so toxic lead and having that completely sequestered and entombed within the gemstone then it's stuck in the gemstone it's not going to weather out it's not going to erode out, and it's now removed from the environment and no longer toxic to people. Even if you accidentally ingested it, it wouldn't break down in the body. It would just secrete it out. And so we're using those kinds of ideas using the gemstone properties as a way of cleaning up environmental disasters or mining lithium in much more economic ways or even treating diseases of the human body as well.
Carol-- I guess this is something that a lot of minds are quite aware of at the moment, aren't they? And they're trying to capture carbon, yeah and so how are you helping mining lithium because obviously there has to be a lot of lithium people want mobile phones computers I mean that I would argue um is probably more environmentally, more environmentally, um what's the word what is the word I want
Aaron-- destructive
Carol-- more environmentally destructive than gem mining
Aaron-- I would agree with that I think that's a fair assumption to make. Right now the demand for lithium is outrageously high, and so mining environmental mining is a secondary aspect of getting the lithium out of the ground. And so we're aware of that we're trying to address that so one thing that we're doing is designing minerals that can absorb lithium out of the sea water. So seawater has a lot of lithium in it, but it's not economical because it's just so poorly concentrated, but if you had a mineral that can just selectively absorb the lithium out of seawater, then it doesn't matter what the concentration of the lithium in the seawater. It's just how much water you pass over it, and so these minerals spontaneously absorb lithium. the acid pushes the lithium out. And turns it to lithium carbonate so the carbonic acid stays with the lithium at that point and turns it to battery-grade lithium carbonate that can then be sold directly to battery manufacturing companies. So basically, it's just a single step, much more environmentally friendly way of removing lithium. There's no digging into the ground, and there's no wasting of water.
Carol-- there's no using because Mercury is used in lithium mining as mercury
Aaron-- umHydrochloric acids, Hard Rock mining, digging deep holes into the ground, so having these different approaches can really help.