Culture

Each year over 16 tons of large-sized meteorites fall down onto the surface of Earth. But until the end of the 18th century, scientists did not believe that meteorites were simply falling down from the sky. All because of the beliefs of the Catholic Church, stating this was impossible.

The first technical devices began to be used in mining back in the 14th century. By the middle of the 18th century, the industrial revolution led to the replacement of tools such as picks, shovels, wedges and hammers, with albeit primitive, but machines.

Mining museum in slideshow format: https://www.youtube.com/embed/yqU_LG0wc2s

The Mining Museum in St. Petersburg is three years older than America, while Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, can be considered the Museum’s rightful mother. Now by its size, it is the world’s third-largest natural-scientific exposition gathered in a building designed by Russian architect Andrey Voronikhin.

The first exhibition of the painting ”Moonlit Night on the Dnieper” took place 140 years ago. As is known, when creating the picture, the artist used special paints based on pigments from the collection of the oldest technical university in Russia.

The Hall contains systematic collections of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks from both Russia and other parts of the world. The exposition is based on the principle of genetic and chemical classification of rocks.

The exposition of the Hall is dedicated to St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region and is conventionally divided into two parts.

The Hall is home to samples of the most significant metallic, non-metallic and hydrocarbon fields both in Russia and abroad, and models of the Berezovsky gold deposit and the Ridder-Sokolny polymetallic deposit.

The expositions of the Hall are devoted to the internal structure of Earth and methods of its study, endogenous geological processes occurring in the depths, and exogenous ones which form the surface relief.

The exposition presents samples that refer to the era of the formation of planet Earth and the entire solar system from primary matter.