{"id":954,"date":"2025-07-17T16:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T16:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/?p=954"},"modified":"2025-08-05T21:07:28","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T21:07:28","slug":"how-a-dusty-old-envelope-led-to-discovery-of-one-of-worlds-rarest-minerals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/17\/how-a-dusty-old-envelope-led-to-discovery-of-one-of-worlds-rarest-minerals\/","title":{"rendered":"How a dusty old envelope led to discovery of one of world\u2019s rarest minerals"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n\t\t\"Humboldtine\"\t<\/div>
Humboldtine doesn’t look like much, but these yellow lumps are highly prized (Picture: Pr\u00f6gler\/LfU)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Roland Eichhorn popped open the dusty cardboard box, he couldn’t believe it. <\/p>\n

There, in the basement of a stuffy government<\/a> office in Germany<\/a>, was a pile of six yellow lumps.<\/p>\n

But these old rocks were one of the rarest minerals found on Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Until the discovery, only about a snowball-sized amount of the mineral, called humboldtine, had ever been found, Roland Eichhorn\u00a0of the Bavarian State Office for the Environment (LfU) said.<\/p>\n

‘And we’ve now found a second snowball,’ he told the German newspaper Welt<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Humboldtine, named after the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, was first discovered in a rundown brown coal deposit in the Czech Republic in 1821.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\t\t\"Humboldtine\t<\/div>
Fewer than 30 samples of humboldtine, officially called FeC2O4.2H2O, have ever been discovered (Picture: Kemner\/LfU)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The mineral is prized highly by collectors<\/a> because it has only been discovered in 30 locations across eight countries, including the UK. <\/p>\n

‘We are legally obligated to make geological collection pieces accessible to the public,’ Eichhorn\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Archivists were asked last year to digitise the agency’s mineral and rock catalogue stored in the LfU basement in Hof, on the banks of the Saale, in 2023.<\/p>\n

While scanning the shelves, a worker stumbled on a note written by a coal mine owner in 1949.<\/p>\n

‘Humboldtine from the Mathias mine near Schwandorf,’ it read, referring to an old open-pit mine for brown coal\u00a0by the river Naab.<\/p>\n

Eichhorn\u00a0was taken aback, to say the least, not only because of how rare the mineral is, but because it wasn’t listed anywhere in the collection.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\t\t\"Mathias\t<\/div>
The Mathias mine in Valbeck, Germany (Picture: Datawrapper\/Metro.co.uk)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The owner of the Mathias mine likely sent in samples of the rock, but it was never documented by agency officials. <\/p>\n

Eichhorn’s team immediately began rifling through more than 13,000 rocks collected across 250 years, only to discover the humboldtine stored anticlimactically in a drawer.<\/p>\n

Inside was a box labelled ‘Oxalit’, German for organic mineral, with the rare material inside.<\/p>\n

The dusty rock is the ‘cyborg among minerals’, Eichhorn said.<\/p>\n

Like all life on Earth, the mineral’s crystal lattice contains carbon, water and oxygen, according to the mineral database Mindat<\/a>. But what sets it apart i the iron these ingredients to life are bound to.<\/p>\n

Humboldtine only forms when iron-rich rocks contact specific acids in damp conditions, creating a lemon-yellow\u00a0clump that can contain crystals. Most of humboldtine unearthed so far are only millimetre\u2011sized grains.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\t\t\"Humboldtine\t<\/div>
Humboldtine (yellow) with halotrichite (white) under a microscope (Picture: Pr\u00f6gler\/LfU)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But how these yellow-amber crumbs formed in the Mathias mine left Eichhorn baffled. <\/p>\n

Brown coal, also called lignite, is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels and has a low concentration of carbon. <\/p>\n

A brown coal mine isn’t exactly the best conditions for humboldtine to form, yet LfU lab tests ‘clearly confirmed’ it was the precious crystal.<\/p>\n

Digging at the mine had closed in 1966 and was flooded with water a few decades later. <\/p>\n

Eichhorn said this makes it almost impossible for officials to investigate the site and obtain clues about where the humboldtine came from.<\/p>\n

‘Why the yellow nodules formed in the Schwandorf brown coal will probably remain a\u00a0mystery<\/a>\u00a0forever,’ the LfU said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk<\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

For more stories like this, <\/strong>check our news page<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n\t\t\tComment now<\/title><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"comment-now__label\">Comments<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t<\/a><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humboldtine doesn’t look like much, but these yellow lumps are highly prized (Picture: Pr\u00f6gler\/LfU) When Roland Eichhorn popped open the dusty cardboard box, he couldn’t believe it. There, in the basement of a stuffy government office in Germany, was a pile of six yellow lumps. But these old rocks were one of the rarest minerals…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":961,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions\/961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mississaugaoffice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}