Beryl

Thanks Tony, very nice!
Sorry for the late reply, somehow I missed it......thanks Rock for paying more attention and adding it!

Hello Harjo!
I have been reading message board for some years, but first now I got time to do something myself.
This article and great photos are enjoyable to read and look. I have found some beryls myself too.
They are are not very fine, but a start anyway. I am waiting rights to add information and photos connected to localities.
As example a small piece of morganite (sorry no measures), Haapaluoma pegmatite mine, Finland
and a very poor photo (b2.jpg), but I like this specimen because it has a natural stand of muscovite.
This one is 3x4x4 cm and it is broken in one corner and it is from Kaatiala, Kuortane, Finland.

best regards

Thanks Pekka.
In the near future I will add photos of the fantastic green gem Beryls from Luumäki. A friend will upload photos of them (he wrote an article about them)

The Evje/Iveland district host several hundred small pegmatite quarries predominantly worked for quartz and feldspar. The area is known for good quality REE minerals and the rare scandium mineral thortveitite. Several quarries has also been worked for beryl, and in the years after WW2, beryl was the main product from a few quarries.

Beryl in these pegmatites occurs embedded in feldspar and quartz and are normally found as opaque greenish/yellowish crystals, although gem quality material are known. The Havåsen quarry has produced some very large crystals. Already in 1933 a crystal weighing around a metric ton was found, and in 1947 a 3,25m long crystal with a 1,3m diameter appeared. This is the biggest beryl crystal found in the area. Rosenquist (1949) describes how 5 crystals with a total weight exceeding 13 tons where extracted the winter 1947-48. Some of this material had " large transparent areas one could see far into", a 270kg piece was one of them. A deep blue aquamarine "leftover fragment" was cut into a 10ct faceted stone.

In 1967 a group of large crystals was found in the Beinmyr quarry. The largest crystal was 3,15 m x 42-54 cm weighing about 1,65 tons. Several other crystasl was found in this period and the book "Iveland 5, mining" contains interviews with former miners how they worked this mine: " We where working for feldspar and mica, and we had just sent away 1 1/2 truckload of muscovite when we suddenly hit a large beryl "nest". After a blast I could se the top cap of a beryl crystal in the wall, and we extracted a total of 3,5 tons from this nest. There where both large and small beryls. The biggest one where 300kgs, and I was able to save a 80kg single crystal with an intact end-cap..... Of other minerals we found columbite and monazite. The monazite was sparse but we found nice, large crystals to hand size. They had a wonderful colour and beautiful crystal development. They probably weighed a few kilograms each."

Large beryls has also been found later. In the 70-ties, Bjarne Engestøl found quite a lot of beryl at Knipane. The largest crystal exceeded 1m. This time, the gemmy material was secured and both stones with a deep yellow and rather deep aquamarine was cut.

Until 10 years ago, Arild Omestad spent a week a year working the Brattekleiv quarry for beryl specimens.This quarry is qute rich in beryl and the size of the crystals are more "cabinet friendly" than the the ton sized crystals.

Many of the crystals may contain gemmy areas, but gem material was not kept as such until the late 60-ties and later. The mining operations was then rapidly declining. Some collector gems has been made, and in particular Ivar Gautestad collected and faceted some material. He has amongst other prepared and sold a handful sets containing 9-12 faceted beryls in different colours from colourless through yellow, green and blue.

Olav,
Thats good information and I am sure that Harjo will be along soon to incorporate it into the article.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Thanks Olav!!
I added your valuable info to the Evje part.
Do you have photos of Beryls from Beinmyr quarry and Havåsen quarry?

Cheers,

Harjo



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2011 08:36PM by Harjo Neutkens.

Harjo,

I would like administrative access to the Best Minerals project so I can add/edit to the articles taken from the locality pages for the Carmelita mine and Pala District, and also help out with the other pegmatite localities in southern California featured here.

Scott

Hi Harjo,

Beryl is one of my most favorite minerals. There are several classical locations for beryl in Germany. One of the best for "ordinary" beryl is Heidelberg. It even has an address: Hirschgasse. A report was published in Lapis 2/2004. Luckily I know the author and was able to obtain a specimen. If you want I can post a picture after my return from Vulcano.

Best Regards


Holger

Scott,
We would like to have you contributions and help here in best minerals because you seem to know your stuff, but before I grant you moderator status I would like you to earn your bones so to speak by picking a mineral and showing us what you can do in terms of generating a best minerals article about it. I would suggest that you, at least to start, pick one of the "smaller" minerals. That means one where there are not thousands of images and hundreds of localities from which to select the ones you want to use to illustrate the article. Ill open up the mineral you want to work on and then you use the reply field to do your work. Eventually, when the article has been knocked into shape and the format tweaked to more or less match the format we have established, Ill take my name off the thread and leave yours. Any of these reply fields is capable of housing any of the articles we have already created (they hold about 60,000 characters). In the past you have commented that this project was an organizational and editorial quagmire, and I would like some assurance that you can work amicably with us before I grand you moderator status.

Have you read the introductory notes to the best minerals project where what we are trying to do here is explained?

A guide to the lay-out for the Best Minerals articles

Welcome to the Best Minerals Forums

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Scott,
If you want to change one of the entries in the Beryl article, use a reply field like this one to create the exact entry that you would like to replace it with including new and different pictures if desired, and of course the text or revised text below the images. This will let Harjo have a look at it and make suggestions if needed.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

In case you require some more Australian Beryl photos, I have a couple that I've uploaded onto my mindat page.
In particular some nice Hart's Range specimens and Northern NSW specimens, feel free to use them if you feel they're suitable.

© Patrick Gundersen

© www.australiancrystals.com.au

Thanks,
Patrick



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2011 10:55AM by Rock Currier.

Holger, yes, please post a Heidelberg Beryl photo, I'll add it to the article. thanks very much!
Scott, let me know what you think should be added to the article and I'll add it, thanks for your cooperation, your help is very welcome.
Patrick, thanks for the photos. I already saw your photos in the database, and I think your Hart's range finds are fantastic, the Beryls as well as the Quartzes. Your Hart's range Aquamarines will definitely feature prominently in the Aquamarine article (I'll try to start that soon).

Patric,
Those beryls are very good for Australia, and I would be very surprised if some of not all of them were not included in the beryl article.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Hi guys,

Harjo, in your beryl article you have taken a static snap shot of the text I wrote for the locality page on mindat for the Carmelita mine and Pala District, both in San Diego County, and there is no date to track from which version of the text you have copied or check if it has been since updated. Additionally, while I don't necessarily mind having you use my name as the author - I am more concerned that mindat has accurate data - the source or user responsible for that data being accounted for within the changes log is good enough record for me, unless we are going to formalize things by using citations and references in these articles, which is also fine by me if needs be.

As of now for the Carmelita mine, the cut and paste of the full article from the locality page is much too lengthy, and lacks depth as to the information on the beryl crystals produced from the deposit over the years. I would like to condense and improve upon this text, as well as to tailor information for the localities you have chosen in Pala, etc.

Rock, What I would like to do, is not so much choose the actual minerals or localities for the project, but improve the data upon your selection of specific localities for those minerals by adding my condensed notes concentrating on the species in question for each locality that I am concurrently developing the location page textual content for in the database, which is basically pegmatites within Riverside and San Diego counties, and a few pegmatite localities or quartz deposits scattered throughout California.

Please note that I've been patiently waiting since the end of August in 2009 for you to make the changes I suggested for the Tourmaline King mine text you wrote in the Quartz article, and this is symptomatic of the editorial quagmire that I mentioned in November of 2009. If I was working with you on this project, the editorial task would have been completed long ago. After I address these smaller issues, then I would be glad to take on a larger responsibility for creating a new best mineral article for one of the neglected species here within my realm of knowledge, preferably something impossibly difficult like tourmaline, or maybe something a little easier like spodumene to start out with.

It just seems logical for me to help assist in developing the text here in best minerals by making changes directly to the content without any double posting routine, which is unnecessarily duplicative, and not necessarily timely. That's why I am asking for editorial user access to the forum, such as I have already enjoyed within the main database for years.

I would expect both of you to make whatever editorial changes you feel are appropriate to my work, and we can move forward from there to eventually perfect the textual content. Since I'm already writing portions of these articles by default, and my authoritative work on mindat is good enough to have been pleasantly plagiarized by the editor-in-chief of Mineralogical Record, then surely I am considered qualified to donate more of my precious time to further the group effort here. B)-

I am familiar with 'A guide to the lay-out for the Best Minerals articles', and the 'Welcome to the Best Minerals Forums'. If I need references from mindat for mindat, then I am listing Jolyon on my résumé.

Scott

Scott,
We could use the help here, but before we grant moderator status to anyone for the best minerals articles we ask that they create a best minerals article here in one of these fields to demonstrate that they can do the work necessary and that they understand the approximate format standards that we have thus far developed. If you would like to create text about the Quartz from the Carmelita mine and Tourmaline King mine, do it in one of the these thread fields and select and insert the images that go with the text and format them to our approximate standards. If you find deficiencies in other Best Mineral articles, and we certainly acknowledge there are plenty of those, please create in one of these response fields a version you think is better. When you can show us some results along these lines, your desire to have moderator status may be favorably considered.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock and Harjo,

Please see my message in the quartz articles at [www.mindat.org].

I feel pretty comfortable with the layout and text formatting. I see there is a lot of work to do, and I'll be glad to help you guys out.

Scott

Harjo

I see only now that you are looking for images of the Finnish gem beryls. I have photographed, measured, weighed and played with most of them. Coming weekend I am going to make a few images, first real time in many many years. I only have snapshots of the beryls but some are quite ok anyway. Someday I may post some of my unusual Scandiinavian specimens. I used to have a great many localities and specimens but storage space was very very large :( and had to be paid for.
Peter

Thanks Peter, I'm eagerly awaiting photos from the Karelia mine, I remember the photos you made for MineralienWelt of some breathtaking green Beryls

I have some good beryls from other localities in Norway than the evje-Iveland area, including a small morganite xl from the Tordal amazonite area, I will try to upload some photo's as soon as I can.

Spencer.

I cannot add photos, but make a remark: shouldn't stoppaniite not also be mentioned as an isostructural species (just like bazzite is).