Below BC
330, 470 Granville St V6C 1V4 Vancouver, BC, Canada

AME #RemoteRoudup Day 3! Today, our Rockhound classes from Burnaby and Surrey will be touring the conference floor. Conference attendees can view the full colle...ction of Rockhounds artwork at the #MineralsEd booth. Come visit us and Leave a note for the students!. #rockhounds #bced #bcminex #mineralexploration #mining #virtualconference Teck

That’s is in the middle of the excitement of Discovery Day last year as part of AME Round Up 2020. We are having a much quieter Sunday this year and miss the mayhem a lot.

Join our friends at Minerals Ed!

Happy New Year. Our new year’s resolution is to post more here! These are some samples from the Peter Christopher collection that were gifted to us by his wife, Christine. We are cataloguing them in hope that we can be back out at public shows this year.

One year ago we were at our last event at the PNE forum. We really miss seeing everyone! Let's hope we can see each other again in 2021. In the meantime, check out our website. https://bbcga.com/

We have been on the road taking some fantastic pictures. Here is a clue

Below BC is in the news! We just completed a trip to the Hazelton area with the Smithers Exploration Group to digitize the geology of the area using a range of technology. This will all be brought online for students and instructors to use in the Fall semester, as well as for the enjoyment of the public!

Trip One focusing on the Hazelton Geotour is done!!! Check out our blog on the Below BC website https://bbcga.com/hazelton-geotour/

Trip One focusing on the Hazelton Geotour is done!!! Check out our blog on the Below BC website https://bbcga.com/hazelton-geotour/

It is field season!!! We are happy to share Scott's description of the Historic mining town of Atlin BC and his time at Engineer Mine: Last year I had my first chance to explore the old gold-rush town of Atlin, while working at the historic Engineer Mine. The scenery surrounding Atlin had been described to me before, but it wasn’t until I was driving south along Highway 7 and seeing the stunning landscape that I realized I was somewhere exceptional. Usually only passing throu...gh before flying to Tagish Lake, the quiet community always had a warming gentleness to it. That feeling was clarified the day we had to evacuate the project due to a wildfire burning across the lake, and getting invited to a BBQ & bonfire by a few folks from town after ensuring we got to our hotels safe and sound. The Klondike Gold Rush ended over a hundred years ago, but the town’s character and landscape still shines with a bright luster. See more

We are on the road again. This is Jacob just north of the Cheekye River taking Gigapan pictures for the Sea to Sky field trip.

Continuing our "Geoscience July" month with a #throwbackthursday! Last month we were contacted by the family of Paul Richardson with the offer of books, papers and artifacts from his personal collection, and we want to celebrate his life and work! Paul had a long career in the mining industry including time spent at Sullivan mine in Kimberley BC. He was given a picture of the mine when he left in 1952. We are holding on to this until we can deliver it to the Kimberley Underg...round Mining railway Collection. He also worked for Dome Mines and Newconex before starting his own consulting company in 1978. Going through his collection has shown what an organized and talented geologist he was. Pictures provided by his family show that geology was truly a life-time passion for him. His handwriting on map drafts and documents is impeccable! We are so appreciative for the opportunity to share his life’s work and geological collection with everyone and will be adding his books to our lending library soon. To read more about his incredible life, go here: https://vancouversunandprovince.remembering.ca//paul-w-ric

#MineralMonday! Let’s start off the week with a splash of green and blue! The green malachite and blue azurite are both copper minerals, but combined with carbonate, and water, with chemical formulas Cu2CO3(OH)2 and Cu2(CO3)2(OH)2. These minerals form by the alteration of copper sulphide minerals which are generally at depth. Weathering and oxidization from the atmosphere or groundwater cause these bright minerals to form coatings on fractures in rocks near the surface. Malac...hite and azurite often indicate that there is more copper nearby, probably under your feet at some depth! This sample came from the Huckleberry Mine in central BC, between Smithers and Prince George where copper was mined until 2016. Check out our 3D image of this specimen at our virtual museum https://bbcga.com/project/19-dv13/ #GeoscienceJuly #BelowBC #MineralMonday #Malachite #Azurite #Copper #BeautifulBritishColumbia

Continuing our "Geoscience July" month with a #throwbackthursday! Last month we were contacted by the family of Paul Richardson with the offer of books, papers and artifacts from his personal collection, and we want to celebrate his life and work! Paul had a long career in the mining industry including time spent at Sullivan mine in Kimberley BC. He was given a picture of the mine when he left in 1952. We are holding on to this until we can deliver it to the Kimberley Underg...round Mining railway Collection. He also worked for Dome Mines and Newconex before starting his own consulting company in 1978. Going through his collection has shown what an organized and talented geologist he was. Pictures provided by his family show that geology was truly a life-time passion for him. His handwriting on map drafts and documents is impeccable! We are so appreciative for the opportunity to share his life’s work and geological collection with everyone and will be adding his books to our lending library soon. To read more about his incredible life, go here: https://vancouversunandprovince.remembering.ca//paul-w-ric

For wild Wednesday @below_bc has officially released the Kimberley's Underground Mining Railway Collection from the Mining Heritage Trip last summer. Big Thanks to Paul Ransom who provided us with samples and great information. This sample contains tin, cassiterite oxide from the Sullivan Mine in Kimberley, BC. #sharegeosciencebc @geosciencebc #minerals #miningheritage #canadianheritage #geology #exploration #mining #geoscience @bcminex https://bbcga.com/project/19-kur14/

Next up for our "Geoscience July", we have something from our teaching collection (#teachingtuesday)!. This specimen is a Fulgurite - a hollow tube of fused sand grains that form when lightning discharges into the ground. When this happens, over 100 million volts of electricity melts the exterior of the sand grains in a split second! As it cools, the melt glues the grains together forming hollow tubes. Fulgurites can be found all over the world, with the largest being from M...ichigan which was almost 5 meters long. They have also been found fossilized, providing evidence of ancient storms! Below BC has over 1,000 rock, mineral and fossil specimens in our teaching collection that we use to engage the public. www.bbcga.com

For our first #MineralMonday for the #GeoscienceJuly series, we’re lumping together several sulphides from the Sullivan Mine in Kimberley, BC. In this beautiful ore zone sample provided to us by the Kimberley Underground Mining Railway, we can see sulphide minerals galena (lead sulphide, PbS), sphalerite (zinc sulphide, ZnS), and pyrrhotite (iron sulphide, Fe1-xS) which were originally deposited in straight parallel sedimentary bands. These bands of sulphides and very fine-gr...ained dark grey sedimentary rock, siltstone, were then folded by tectonic forces related to mountain building. At the Sullivan Mine, the galena is often associated with silver, and is therefore termed argentiferous galena with the formula (Pb, Ag)S and variable amounts of lead and silver bonded with sulphur. These sulphide minerals were formed about 1470 million years ago in a submarine setting, when hot metal-rich geothermally driven fluids were circulating in the ocean-floor rocks. When these hot fluids carrying Pb, Ag, Zn, Fe, and S cations met the cold ocean water, the minerals precipitated. This is similar to how modern-day black smokers precipitate minerals on the seafloor. Check out our high resolution 3D image of the mineral specimen in our online gallery! https://bbcga.s3.amazonaws.com/BBC_VirtualMuse//index.html

Next up for #GeoscienceJuly, we are bringing you a special #fossilfriday! As many of you know, we have been studying the geology of the Kitsilano Foreshore for the past few years, and during that time we have collected hundreds of data point, images and even made a few fossil discoveries! We have put all of this together to create a pilot version of the "Online Classroom" modules we are developing to not only educate the public, but also provide information for students and ...instructors to use in lieu of field trips. You can browse the geological features of the beach, download datasets to use in mapping software, collect measurements on the gigapan sections, learn about the paleoenvironment and much more! To view the site, please visit https://bbcga.com/kitsbeachgeotour_main/ To see our current fundraiser to build more of these modules: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-geology-labs Enjoy!

Here is our first #throwbackthursday post for #GeoscienceJuly! Introducing our Legacy Collection! Our legacy collection currently consists of items donated by Barry Price, Peter Christopher, Barbara Caelles and most recently, Paul Richardson as well as other geoscientists. ... The collection includes a wide range of materials, from books and maps to equipment and even rock specimens, representing entire careers of geological research. Our goal over the next few months is to continue the accession of our book collection so we can make the books become available to borrow or for you to come sit in one of our cosy armchairs and read. We will also be working on having the maps and geological research scanned and uploaded so that students and professionals will be able to use this information for their current research into geological areas of BC, Canada and beyond. We will be highlighting items from the collection on #throwbackthursdays for the month of July, so watch out for more posts this month!

We have launched a fund raising campaign to help universities provide online alternatives to labs / field schools that are being disrupted into the Fall / Winter due to COVID-19. We are looking to complete a few trips over the next few months so we can have content ready by the start of the next semester. The "modules" we are putting forward align with the teaching goals and class content of various universities and institutions within British Columbia, and will also be a gre...at "post-COVID" resource, and will be publicly available so schools from outside of BC can use the material. Each trip will build interactive content that can be manipulated on screen, studied and even allow for the collection of data for students to use in statistical or mapping applications. We will use our 360-camera rig, gigapan technology, macro photography, microscopes and good old fashioned field data collection to build up each module. So please consider supporting this initiative which in turn will help students and instructors have access to essential geoscience learning! To learn more about the project or Below BC, please visit the link below! Thank You! #geoscience #datascience #teaching #instructors #students #geology #virtualclassroom #nonprofit

Happy Canada Day!!! Welcome to Geoscience July!! This month Below BC will be promoting geology with the following subjects:... #MineralMonday Focusing on BC minerals #TeachingTuesday looking at items in our teaching collection from beyond BC #WildCardWednesday anything could happen!! #ThrowBackThursday - an invitation to take a closer look at our legacy collection and the people and places that they came from #FossilFriday fossils from BC and beyond Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see what we are looking at each day and reach out to us if there is anything you would like us to look at or if you would like to contribute pictures or history of your own!