On Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., we’ll be having our monthly meeting featuring…
Mineral Geology of New England:
Metamorphic Minerals
with Scot Krueger
About the presenter…
Scot Krueger grew up in northeastern Massachusetts as the son of a geologist (former BMC President Hal Krueger) and has been collecting minerals longer than he can remember. Scot earned an undergraduate degree in geology from MIT, and a PhD from Cal Berkeley, before going on to a career as a geologist with the USGS and several oil companies. He retired back to Boston in 2016 and rejoined the BMC after being away for more than 3 decades. He has been producing an extensive set of serial articles for the club’s BMC News newsletter on the Mineral Geology of New England, and this talk covers material from several of those articles.
The details…
The meeting will start with some time for socializing, then discussion of club business and welcoming of new members, followed by the talk by Scot.
Scot’s talk will focus on mountain building caused by the collision of tectonic plates during the Paleozoic, which led to the wide range of popular metamorphic minerals found here. He’ll discuss the series of collisions between island arcs and continents that led to the formation of the Himalaya-scale mountain range, the remnants of which we call the Appalachians. Many of the rocks found at the surface today were buried more than 15 miles below the surface during these collisions, before erosion brought them back up. As a result, New England is home to a wide range of metamorphic grades spanning from zeolite, through prehnite-pumpellyite, chlorite, garnet and, in the core of the range, all the way to sillimanite. This talk will discuss the timing and geographic distribution of these metamorphic pulses across New England, with many images of mineral specimens.
After the talk, we’ll have the traditional BMC specimen raffle! Buy some tickets for a chance to win!
Hope to see you there!