The first known mention can be found in the U of A Register from 1892, which rather grandly states the university will “make the Museum of Geology and Mineralogy an adequate representative of the ores and minerals of Arizona, as well as a place for the deposit of everything illustrative of the practical workings of the mines, mills, and furnaces.”

Curatorial Specialist Sven Bailey patiently studied the history of the University of Arizona Mineral Collection and recorded the five other temporary homes it occupied before relocating to the spacious and airy basement of the Flandrau Science Center.

A view across part of the main gallery of the University of Arizona's wonderful mineral museum. Photograph by Geoffrey Notkin

If you walk into the Science Center, past the planetarium, maybe pausing for a moment to admire the Mars Wall, and then scamper down two long flights of stairs decorated with brightly painted murals, you will come upon a geologist’s dreamscape. The main collection comprises some 19,000 specimens, plus 7,000 micromounts. Of special delight to me was the mysterious Silverbell iron meteorite. Discovered in 1939, somewhere northwest of Tucson, the exact find location has been lost to science, and the UA Mineral Museum has the largest piece in the world. In addition, I was intrigued by a mock-up of the famous Tucson Ring meteorite, appearing as it did back in the 1800s during the least glamorous part of its life (it was once used as an anvil in the Tucson presidio, and has now been promoted to the rather magnificent centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s meteorite display in Washington, D.C.).

At the mineral museum, a detailed recreation with full-scale models demonstrates how the Tucson Ring and Carleton iron meteorites were once used in a blacksmith's shop in frontier-era Tucson. The actual meteorites are now part of the Smithsonian's collection in Washington, D.C. Photograph courtesy of Flandrau Science Center.

“Our collection is actively used for research, and the curator is currently building a new mineral database,” Sven tells me. He is a tall, soft spoken, and thoughtful man. He seems wonderfully at ease in the beautiful and elegant underground collection; he could almost be the custodian of a secret treasure mine. “Some of our meteorites and minerals are studied by Planetary Sciences,” he continues. “And they are also available for students. Some university instructors lead field trips to the museum and assign extra credit.” Now, that’s my idea of school Extra credit for looking at rocks!

This spectacular example of the mineral pyrargyrite from Hartenstein Germany is just one of 19,000 specimens in the museum's main collection. Photograph by Sven Bailey / Courtesy of UA Mineral Museum

The mineral museum welcomes school programs, and children of all ages have enjoyed the remarkable collection with a concentration of students from First through Eighth Grades. Last year over 100 school groups visited the Flandrau and the mineral museum, and that translates into a lot of kids getting a first-hand look at geology, mineralogy, mining history, and meteorites.

The museum is also open to the general public and Sven and his colleagues are available to answer mineral-related questions. For many years, Senior Curatorial Specialist Shirley Wetmore, served in a “first contact” capacity with visitors who stopped by with samples hoping they had found a meteorite or rare mineral. Shirley was universally liked, did a great deal to further the public’s understanding of rocks, minerals, and meteorites, and recently retired from the museum.

Sven is a hard working man, handling the equivalent of several different jobs at once. In addition to showing visitors around and answering questions, he is engaged in an ongoing project to photograph the mineral collection (see photos on this page), keeps the website up to date, and helps design and coordinate signage and special exhibitions.

A large and intricate specimen of natural silver from the museum's collection. Photograph by Sven Bailey / Courtesy of UA Mineral Museum

It always feels good to see people happy in their work and Sven is especially enthusiastic when he leads me into a back room, opens an impressive safe, and produces a genuinely staggering specimen of leaf gold. Found on the Crystalline-Alabama Claim in Jamestown, California, it was recently acquired by the museum with the rest of the Hubert de Monmonier collection, a significant group of minerals, never before seen in public. Approximately 870 pieces, including some very important specimens, and 300 books, were donated by the de Monmonier estate. A stunning exhibit of some of the finest pieces from that collection is currently on display in the Flandrau’s main exhibition space.

So, doesn’t all of this sound great? A world-class mineral museum with active ongoing research programs, rare meteorites, beautiful displays, a friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff keen to interact with, and inform the public. Too good to be true? Almost. Due to budget cuts the University of Arizona Mineral Museum is only open on Fridays and Saturdays, and to school groups by appointment. If the feared permanent closure of the Flandrau Science Center does take place, what will become of this extraordinary collection?

Curatorial Specialist Sven Bailey and a leaf gold specimen from the Hubert de Monmonier collection, recently acquired by the Mineral Museum. Photograph by Geoffrey Notkin.

117 years ago, UA set out to build a mineral collection that would reflect the epic geologic and mining history of Arizona. They succeeded admirably. Now this great collection is open for only two days a week, and even that may be nothing but a temporary stay of execution. After six years with the museum, the talented Sven Bailey is moving on to a new job unconnected with the university. “Will we miss his expertise terribly,” said Executive Director Alexis Faust. But with the museum and the Science Center facing an uncertain future, who can blame Sven for moving on? Maybe if the Flandrau had a sufficient operating budget he would have stayed.

In a recent letter to Tucson Weekly, former associate director of the Flandrau, Joe Ruggiero, shared this fine sentiment: “For 35 years, through good times and bad, Flandrau provided this community with some measure of wonder, a place where one could come face to face with phenomena and see the beauty of the sky explained in vivid detail.”

Alexis, the current director states: “We have wonderful resources here. There should be a conduit for that information to get to the people of Tucson, the taxpayers.”

The Flandrau Science Center and the UA Mineral Museum are part of that conduit. The mineral museum is an extremely important and unique educational and historical resource. Allowing it to be closed, and therefore lost to the people of Tucson, would be a crime against science.

If you head east out of Las Vegas on the interstate and take the exit for 93 North you will quickly spy one of my favorite road signs in the United States: “The Great Basin Highway.” By modern standards 93 is not exactly a highway but it is a marvelous long stretch of fast two-lane blacktop that runs through some grand and startling scenery.

An abandoned miner's cottage east of US 93

I imagine most who drive the quiet road are unaware that about 370 million years ago they would have been traveling through a warm, shallow sea, speckled with coral reefs, thriving with life. Fewer still will realize that once they pass Hancock Summit, where the road climbs sharply, bends, and then heads, unnervingly straight, to the north, they are entering the remains of a truly gigantic and ancient meteorite crater.

Most meteorites are rich in the element iron, so prolonged exposure to terrestrial elements will cause them to decay. The meteorite that crashed here, before mammals and birds learned to walk and fly, is long gone, but it leaves the traces of its passing within the hills and mountains of Lincoln County.

Mine workings on a precipice in the Nevada Mountains

A breccia (pronounced “brech — ee — uh”) is a rock composed of fragments of other rocks, cemented together. When a large meteorite hits our planet, shatters the target rock at the point of impact, and the resulting mixed-up pieces are compacted together by heat and pressure, an impact breccia is formed. If you climb far enough up into the hills around Tempiute Mountain, Nevada, and know where to look, you’ll see a profusion of them.

An outcrop of the Alamo impact breccia in the Nevada mountains. The rock hammer is included for scale.

Named after a nearby town, the Alamo Breccia covers an area of hundreds of square miles, making it one of the world’s largest remnant meteorite craters. The inferno that followed the impact must have exterminated all life for scores of miles in every direction. An atomic bomb would have been a firework in comparison. The meteorite slammed into the long-vanished ocean, and exploded among the coral reefs. Tiny fossils, embedded in the breccia, tell the story. To learn more about impactites see “Ghostly Footprints of Ancient Meteorites” on Geology.com.

Once below sea level, the Alamo layer has been raised thousands of feet and exposed, in places, by geological processes. To the casual observer, the breccia layer might appear much like any other stratum of ordinary rock, but a studied look will reveal a multi-colored kaleidoscope of angular fragments, pulverized by a cataclysmic meteoritic event. When cut and polished, the Alamo Breccia is as lovely as a Paul Klee painting. And it takes a feat of imagination to peer from a mountainside at 8,000 feet, then tell yourself you are standing on something that once lay at the bottom of a submerged crater.

A cut and polished section of the Alamo Breccia. The white area, bottom left, is fossil coral. Photograph by Leigh Anne DelRay.

I recently returned from my fourth visit to the Alamo Breccia site. Usually, not much changes up there in the Nevada mountains, in terms of human time at least. But I noted with interest a couple of new mines, perched most precariously on steep and dangerous cliff faces. How did they get all the equipment up there? Mules? Even my sturdy 4WD Tacoma, veteran of many a scary off-road moment, could not possibly make the trip; it is a demanding hike on steep and treacherous trails.

With their diminutive railroad tracks, and Seven Dwarves-sized entrances, those hidden mines looked like something out of a classic western film. I immediately thought of bears, then rattlesnakes, and finally mountain lions, but recklessly crept inside two of mine entrances anyway. I half expected to see Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart hunched in the darkness, tending a small fire and arguing about how to divide up the gold.

Spooky mine entrance near Tempiute Mountain, Nevada

They don’t make movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre anymore, but one thing holds true: Wherever there are valuable rocks, no matter how difficult they may be to reach, some enterprising prospector will stake a claim and eke a hard living out of the buried veins.

All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted. © Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved, copyright strictly enforced.

When I was a little lad, growing up in London, my first great love was geology. After high school I went to work for an American oil exploration company based in the UK. Although I was privileged and lucky to have such employment, before I even had a college degree, I quickly learned that research work in the lab was not really for me. I wanted to be out there in the savage places: deserts, rift valleys, and volcanoes, cracking up slabs with my rock hammer, not studying seismic charts in an office.

So, at a fairly early age I devised a list of what I considered to be the geological wonders of the world and I intended on seeing every one of them. I have done quite well so far: the famous Vesuvius volcano in Italy, Oregon’s Crater Lake, The Grand Canyon, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the fjords and glaciers of Norway, Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Burren in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, and the steaming geysers of Iceland. But one vitally important name on that list eluded my every effort: the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

An abandoned tug boat settles slowly into the River Liffey, Dublin

Back in the 1970s and ’80s my eccentric but adventurous family typically added a couple of stops at noteworthy scientific sites to any holiday itinerary, in order to placate me. Before he retired, my father was an important figure in international trade and development and he did a lot of work in Ireland. My mother, younger brother Andrew, and I, often tagged along on his business trips, but we always went to the south—The Republic of Ireland. The civil war in Ireland, or “The Troubles” as the Irish called it, was in full swing in the 1970s, with explosives going off on trains and homemade petrol bombs being thrown, almost daily it seemed, at British armored cars in Belfast. Despite my most serious protestations along the lines of “It can’t be that dangerous,” we never did venture into the north.

My father now lives in Dublin, and a couple of years ago I made the long trip from Tucson to see him. After several days of pubs, dinners, conversation, and family obligations, I grew restless. Following a little gentle coercion, Dad agreed we should rent a car, just the two of us, and set off to see Belfast and the wild northern coast.

We stayed at a gorgeous old hotel in the small town of Bushmills in County Antrim which, very handily, is the home of the Bushmill’s whisky distillery, a fact that would later add a little spice to the trip. We arrived late in the day after a long drive, and Dad announced that he would enjoy a short nap. We were only a few miles from the Giant’s Causeway, but the shuttle bus that took visitors down to see it would have ceased operations by that hour. Dad encouraged me to motor over there anyway, and see if I could find my own way down the site.

The visitors’ car park was nearly empty, the gift shop closed, but Ireland’s northerly latitude means long, long summer days. So, I locked the car and started out on foot. It was a pretty good haul and somewhat damp and chilly for a resident of the Sonoran Desert. I saw a couple of windblown sightseeing stragglers, walking slowly and forlornly back to their cars. Eventually, I came up over a rise and there was the Causeway ahead of me—blissfully deserted.

Where the stone meets the sea: The Giant's Causeway continues its march against time into the cold North Atlantic

The Causeway, contradictory to colorful local lore, was not fabricated by giants or legendary warriors during some distant mythical period. It is the result of ancient volcanic activity that created tens of thousands of vertical, mostly hexagonal, basalt columns. This astonishing assemblage of geometric pedestals, of varying heights and sizes, arcs into a restless grey and green sea and looks at times like a monstrous pipe organ.

I clambered over every inch of that geological wonderland and filled two digital cameras with photographs. I was breaking in an expensive new Nikon and many times I had to shield it from spray as cold waves broke around me. And I imagined I could make out the distant voice of my late mother calling: “Geoffrey, don’t get close to the edge, it’s dangerous!” Something I heard a million times as a kid.

Rapid cooling of molten lava about 60 million years ago caused fractures and fragmentation, resulting in the formation of thousands of vertical geometric columns at the Giant's Causeway

As the sun retreated sullenly into the Atlantic, I tore myself away and proceeded back to the hotel. Bubbling over with amazement and excitement I expounded, at considerable length, about the Causeway to my amused father who had visited it some years earlier. Accomplished and open minded though my father is, they were still pretty much a pile of black rocks to him.

In the morning I was all fired up to go back and see them again in daylight. After breakfast we returned to the site, which had taken on an entirely different, and very disturbing, aspect. The car par was choked with tour buses, and dazed tourists shambled everywhere, sucking down mushy ice cream cones and squawking about the weather. It was appalling. I rapidly purchased a couple of postcards and said to my father: “I can’t deal with this nightmare, let’s get out of here.” He smiled and said: “Yes I thought it would be like this during the day. Aren’t you glad you made the trip last night?”

Seawater on basalt under a grey sky

Being resourceful and adaptable chaps, we cut our losses and headed over to the Bushmill’s distillery for some good cheer. I sipped a glass of vintage Irish whisky and happily added one long sought-after check mark to my childhood list.

Photographs by the author. All rights reserved. Copyright strictly enforced. © Geoffrey Notkin