Wooden pencil box with printed sliding lid and set of 12 coloured pencils.

This image is from one of the panels in our "Crystal Portal" found in the Origins Gallery within the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip.  Inside the Origins Gallery, you'll see objects and stories from the beginning of the Universe to the formation of our Earth, and a magnificent showcasing of the mineral diversity in our beautiful State, Western Australia.

The striking "Crystal Portal" features special photographs of different minerals taken using a very cool "petrographic" microscope.  By applying polarising filters to the light (like those in sunglasses) we can see the amazing colours and textures within the mineral composition. The photographs have been created by the different crystal structures of the minerals interfering with the light - that's what makes the colours you see.

To see the psychedelic colours, our Geologists glue a block of rock to a thin glass slide, slicing off as much of the rock as possible, then grinding the remainder down to a thickness of 30 microns (or 0.003mm).  When they do this, many rocks become transparent and whole new worlds are revealed under the microscope.

‘Quartzite a non-foliated metamorphic rock composed almost entirely of quartz.  Schist is a foliated metamorphic rock that contains abundant mica or other platy mineral grains, combined these two form the Quarzitic Schist mineral photographed here.’

Design: Quarzitic Schist from Eastern Albany-Fraser Orogen, Western Australia
Image courtesy of the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA)