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MINERAL SCIENCES

by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

By supporting the Mineral Science Department, you are providing an important resource to help us work towards a greater understanding of modern geological and environmental issues, and to quickly share those results to our community who are concerned about the impacts of our changing planet. Funds raised here go directly to support students, research projects, and collection care & expansion.

The Mineral Sciences Department is multidisciplinary, and we are always looking to mentor highly motivated researchers from high school through post-doctoral scholars. Current research foci include developing minerals for environmental and industrial applications, Mars and icy moon mineralogy and astrobiology, understanding how climate change affects our planet, mineral discovery and description, and so much more.

In Mineral Sciences, we are tirelessly working to build our world-class collection that includes minerals, gems, meteorites, rocks, and ores. The collection is home to the world’s rarest gem, the oldest rocks in the solar system, and an extensive collection of California gems and minerals. We are steadily increasing the size and breadth of the collection, creating a need for storage improvements. We are working on ways to better preserve minerals that are not stable at room temperature and pressure, curating rare minerals that have important environmental and technological applications, all the while building a vast mineral repository for researchers to use and easily access.

Did you know that nearly all of the minerals in  the Gem & Mineral Hall were given to us through donations or purchased for us through gifts? The Gem & Mineral Hall is not just full of amazing specimens that showcase Earth's beauty, but they are records of how Earth and our Solar System have evolved. Each one of the specimens in  the Hall is also a research specimen, which gives our visitors a unique opportunity to see the objects that tell the story of our planet's past and future.
 
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