Mineral Monday is a weekly video series exploring the many amazing minerals, fossils, and historic objects on display at the W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum as told by museum ...

The Mohs hardness scale is a relative scale usually used for minerals and does not involve any measurement of deformation, as do other quantitative methods. It simply involves the assignment of a ...

Geologists do it according to the Mohs Scale of Hardness. There. That’s your “hardness” joke for the post. Now down to business, with the hardest (and softest) scale there is. In 1812, people had just ...

Happy Mineral Monday! This week, we look at the mineral Talc. This soft mineral sits at a 1 on the Mohs Hardness Scale, and when ground up becomes a common household powder. Any guesses what that ...

Minerals are naturally occurring, non-living compounds of elements. They are the building blocks of rocks. Geologists are greatly interested in minerals because they can reveal an enormous amount ...

Gold hunters in southern Russia might have been disappointed to learn that the speckled, yellow rock they uncovered was not a sizeable pebble of valuable metal. Instead, it was a rare piece of ...

Hardest Natural Substance: The hardest natural substance on Earth is Diamond. It is a form of pure carbon, where atoms are arranged in a strong three-dimensional crystal lattice. This unique ...