Mining Museum News

It took hundreds of millions of years for geological processes to form a single supercontinent, Pangea, in the Late Paleozoic. About 220 million years ago, it split in two. Today, the six continents on Earth are very slowly but surely moving toward each other. The Mining Museum now has the opportunity to visualize the history of the Earth’s crust and its dynamics in the future, as well as many other natural processes on the Earth and other planets with its new acquisition - a digital demonstration complex with a spherical screen.

An exhibition of the Urban Sketchers international community of artists began its work at the Mining Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibition presents paintings in the technique of rapid drawing, depicting the interiors and exhibits of one of the largest natural science museums in the world.

Pictures of historical exhibits from the Mining Museum will be included in the catalogue commemorating the 300th anniversary of the petroleum industry in Russia.

St. Petersburg Mining Museum’s researchers have recreated the look of rare 19th-century fluorite vases. …Matthew Boulton, an English manufacturer, was one of the first in Europe to start making decorative items from fluorite, a rare naturally occurring mineral. In late-18th-century Birmingham, his factory produced such art objects as candelabra, bowls, potpourri vases. They were not made by hand, though. The workers carved them using machines powered by a steam engine.

It has been decades since museums, along with books and theatre, were foretold to cease to exist. COVID-19 has indeed contributed to the debate regarding the ”things of the past”.

To get an idea of how Earth looked like in the distant past, one just has to look attentively at today’s living creatures. Some ancient animals still resemble their progenitors. Some organisms are no longer found. The others have survived without losing their original form.

The scientific team, created in February 2021 on the basis of the Department of Geology and Exploration of Mineral Deposits and the Mining Museum, returned from its first field trip to the Putilovsky open pit.

On the eve of Victory Day, a wreath-laying ceremony took place at the oldest technical university in Russia. Wreaths and flowers were laid at the foot of the memorial to the students and professors who died during the Great Patriotic War.

In 1918, the Soviet government relocated from Petrograd to Moscow. Subsequently, some of the Mining Museum’s most valuable objects were transferred to the Diamond Fund, which did not, however, stop the natural-scientific repository from replenishing its collections. By early 1941, the Museum had accumulated 130,014 exhibits, of which 25,540 were on display - samples of minerals, rocks and fossils, models and prototypes of mining and metallurgical equipment. The Mining Museum was highly popular at the time, by no means inferior to the Hermitage or Tsarskoye Selo.

In 1816 - 205 years ago - Empress Catherine the Great signed a decree on transferring her private collection of minerals from the Hermitage to the Mining Museum. The collectables were mentioned as far back as in the first guide to St. Petersburg. Yet, they have remained mixed with the rest of the exhibits for almost two centuries, with some of the items ending up gifted to other museums.