No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The tourmaline diaries: An eye-catching mineral and its many facets
... Walton 2001). The term tourmaline is considered to be derived from the Sinhalese word turmali, a term used by the gem dealers of Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka) to refer to unclassified mixed-colored stones (Henry and Dutrow 2012b). ...
... For example, the 14 th century Czech crown of Saint Wenceslas, made for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, featured a large red "ruby". This stone is now known to be a red tourmaline (Hyršl and Neumanová 1999;Henry and Dutrow 2012b). Tourmaline's use as a gemstone was intermittent until the late 19 th century when the Dowager Empress Ts'u Hsi of China popularized pink tourmaline as a gemstone (e.g. ...
Tourmaline studies have been an integral part of science and scientific exploration for centuries and continue to flourish today. In the 19th century, the curious pyroelectric and piezoelectric properties of this mineral attracted the attention of scientists who considered tourmaline central to a grand unification of the theories of heat, electricity and magnetism. The common occurrence of tourmaline in granites and granitic pegmatites was widely known at that time, but, subsequently, tourmaline was discovered in a great range of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks and a variety of ore deposits, including hydrothermal systems. The chemical complexity of this mineral became more fully established and “appreciated” by the end of the 19th century. In the early-and mid-20th century, tourmaline studies greatly expanded as a consequence of the (1) exploration of wider ranges of geological settings, (2) development of instrumentation to characterize the chemical and physical properties of minerals and (3) the applications that derived from these studies. In clastic sedimentary rocks, tourmaline was identified as one of the most important heavy minerals and became a means to estimate maturity of the clastic sediment, to determine provenance and to make stratigraphic correlations. The crystallography of tourmaline was more fully understood and the overall structure and general structural formula was known by the 1960–1970’s. Applications of tourmaline relied originally on its piezoelectric properties that became increasingly important during the 20th century. One application, developed after World War I, was the detection and measurement of conventional and atomic explosion pressures based on tourmaline’s piezoelectric properties. Tourmaline studies have expanded in breadth and greatly increased in number since 1977, when micro-analytical and crystallographic/spectroscopic instrumentation became widely available. Petrologically, tourmaline has become a valuable petrogenetic indicator mineral in rocks and sediments due to its occurrence in most rock types, its extreme P–T range of stability, from the near surface to the deepest levels of the crust, its capacity to attain a chemical signature during the evolution of the rock in which it is formed, its ability to retain that chemical imprint, and its capability to provide specific information on the time, temperature and fluid history of its host rock. More recent studies have greatly expanded the conceptual framework of its internal structure and have dramatically increased the number of tourmaline species from 4 to 33. The future of tourmaline studies is promising with many new and exciting possibilities that will continue to influence scientific inquiry well into the future.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.