McNamee and Gunter prepared this Mineralogy and Optical Mineralogy Lab Manual around 2010 and makes it available now, thus being evidence of the wonder of the Internet and of the generosity of many in academia. This lab manual acts as a skeleton to be built upon and instructors are encouraged to add mineral samples, projects, and exercises as they see fit. Throughout this laboratory course, students are walked through the techniques and methods of identifying minerals by their properties. This is achieved by using Dennis Tasa’s DVD accompaniment of the textbook Mineralogy and Optical Mineralogy by M. Darby Dyar and Mickey E. Gunter (2008) with a variety of tools available, such as the Polarized Light Microscope (PLM). These methods are applied to only a few minerals with an emphasis on Dyar and Gunter’s “Big Ten” Minerals.
Instead of overwhelming students with a hundred different mineral species, this lab manual focuses on how to describe and measure the properties of
minerals, how to use those observations to identify any mineral, and the unique properties of common mineral groups and species.
Introduction
The unique aspect about the textbook Mineralogy and Optical Mineralogy is the DVD complement. The DVD contains all of the book’s figures in color and with animation. A searchable mineral database is also included on the DVD. Each mineral within the database can be printed into a 2-page summary.
When students are first introduced to the properties of minerals, they will use the properties they have observed and the DVD database search feature to identify their unknown mineral. They will also use this feature to identify the minerals they found for their mineral collection project at the end of the semester. Throughout the semester, students will refer to the database on the DVD and use the summary sheets as a foundation to create their own mineral database and append their own notes.
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