In this section I will try to report on the activities that I take part in. Collecting trips, meetings, symposia, lectures. Click on the photos to see the whole message. If you would like to comment or have questions, please use the guest book to do so.
Yesterday I visited the Antwerp mineral fair Minerant - the first real live mineral event after all the lockdowns. We all really loved it... Refreshing our friendships and contacts was a great pleasure after all this time...
Last week my buddy André Robbemond and I were on a collecting trip in the Italian regions of Lombardia and Piedmont, together with our Italian friend and colleague Nazareno La Manna. Under his inspiring guidance we learned to know a number of other people in the field of mineralogy, visited a number of very interesting collecting locations, and...
Two weeks ago I had the honour to do an online presentation for the Micromount Zoom Club on the minerals of the Australian ore deposit Iron Monarch, of which I reported earlier, see my previous blogs. The presentation is available on YouTube, here is the link: https://youtu.be/6wN2BNKbjzk
The Landelijk Platform Geologie is a national coöperative platform of several geological, mineralogical and gemmological societies in the Netherlands. Due to corona the yearly symposium on april 17th was online. The symposium was dedicated to the geology, paleontology and mineralogy of the Volcanic Eifel in Germany. I was invited to give a...
GEA is the quarterly magazine from the Dutch Geological Activities Foundation. Last week a special issue of the magazine was released, the main topic being interesting geological and mineralogical collecting sites in Western Europe. I am honoured to be one of the contributors, with an article on the great finds of microminerals in the Graulai...
A few months ago I received the very hard to find book of Glyn Francis, The Minerals of Iron Monarch. Since then I have tried to find a real mineral collection from there, and with the help of my Australian collector friends that finally succeeded. I have a very special and unique collection of about 100 micromounts now. I've started...
Yesterday evening I did a presentation of my specimen collection from the famous Lavrion mines in Greece, for the Micromount Zoom Club. As always afterwards the presentation was uploaded to YouTube. Here is the link if you would be interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dptdZtd1QAQ
I am member of a group of some 30 micromount aficionados from all over the world. We do an online meeting every two weeks, and every time one of the members gives a presentation. Yesterday it was my turn with a presentation on the Volcanic Eifel in Germany. If you like you can see and download it by clicking on the photo....
Thanks to the effort of my Australian collector friend last week I received the book Minerals of Iron Monarch. This mining site in South-Australia produced 176 different minerals. The book is hard to come by these days, let alone finding fine mineral specimens from there. The book is a pleasure to read.
The last few weeks I spend a considerable amount of time compiling a book with 98 of my best mineralphotos. Yesterday I received the first edition of it and I dare to say that I am very pleased with the result. The book is hard cover and of course all photos are described with name of the mineral, location of...