Fun With Asbestos

This exercise is designed for a mid/upper-level undergraduate geology course on the principles of mineralogy.

Students should have knowledge of basic chemistry and of minerals equivalent to what they would learn in an introductory geology class.

This activity is the 17th of 36 mineralogy exercises and is used around the middle of the course.

• Learn about different properties that can be seen with an optical microscope. Relief, extinction angle, birefringence, etc., are observable in this exercise.
• Become familiar with mineral properties in thin section.
• Learn to distinguish asbsestiform and related minerals from each other.

• Learn to sift through data in order to identify that which is key to solving a problem.

• Recognize practical and meaningful applications for petrography and science.

This exercise is a practical application of optical mineralogy involving identification of some asbestiform minerals. First, students learn about asbestos and its various forms and are posed several related questions. Then, they look at several asbestos grain mounts under a petrographic microscope and answer more related questions.

• Mineralogy Course Summary and Goals
• Mineralogy Course Syllabus
• Brady, Mogk and Perkins, 1997, Teaching Mineralogy, Mineralogical Society of America, pp 91-96