Beryl var: Morganite with Topaz and Quartz on Albite

Item Description

Morganite is the pink Beryl variety, named after J. P. Morgan, the famous American financier and investment banker. Good crystals of Morganite are not found from many world localities in fine, well-formed examples, and matrix examples are notably rare. Most of the good matrix Morganites you'll find these days come from Afghanistan. This is a good quality hefty cabinet sized piece of from Afghanistan dating back circa the 1990s-early 2000s. Good specimens from Afghanistan haven't been in decent supply for several years now, as the sources are drying up. There hasn't been much found in places like Brazil or San Diego County, CA either, so you really have to search for good Morganites these days. This piece features an very soft pink colored tabular crystal of Morganite measuring 3.7 cm, associated with a few prismatic, GEMMY, colorless crystals of Topaz measuring up to 1.3 cm along with a few scattered slightly smoky colored Quartz crystals sitting on a big mound of white bladed Albite var: Cleavelandite. If you flip the piece over, you'll see several dark green (virtually black) Tourmaline crystals that are growing into the bottom of the piece. The Morganite crystal is complete, with many modifying faces all over, but it's hard to illustrate the quality in the video. A great big showy example of this well-known material that will go down as classics from Afghanistan.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.