{"id":101658,"date":"2020-10-30T22:42:32","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T19:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-a-quebec-rock-collector-amassed-a-multi-million-dollar-national-treasure\/"},"modified":"2020-10-30T22:42:32","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T19:42:32","slug":"how-a-quebec-rock-collector-amassed-a-multi-million-dollar-national-treasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-a-quebec-rock-collector-amassed-a-multi-million-dollar-national-treasure\/","title":{"rendered":"#How a Quebec rock-collector amassed a multi-million-dollar \u2018national treasure’"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How a Quebec rock-collector amassed a multi-million-dollar \u2018national treasure’<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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Samples from Haineault\u2019s collection, including (clockwise from top left) analcime on microcline; an ice-cream scoop of leifite with serandite; catapleiite and natrolite; the slug-green-coloured sphalerite and albite; watermelon look-alike serandite and catapleiite; and the blue beauty fluorcarletonite (Courtesy of Gilles Haineault\/Canadian Museum of Nature)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It was the beginning of the 1980s when a Quebec beekeeper caught the bug\u2014\u201cla piq\u00fbre\u201d\u2014for a hobby that would fill his house with rocks. Thousands and thousands of rocks. Rocks big and small. Rocks colourful and grey. Rocks worth millions of dollars.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that Gilles Haineault woke up in the middle of the night and heard the call of rock-collecting, exactly. His cousin, a member of a mineralogy club in Montreal, went on excursions to quarries every weekend and invited him to join in one day. Something about the methodical search for strange, veiny rocks app<\/a>ealed to him. Luckily, his beloved late wife, Liliane, was into it, too, and they began regular trip<\/a>s to geological hot spots all over Quebec.<\/p>\n

At a quarry only a few minutes away from his apiary in Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, just south of Montreal, Haineault struck gold\u2014so to speak.<\/p>\n

Over the years, he was such a frequent visitor that the Carri\u00e8res Mont Saint-Hilaire (formerly known as the Carri\u00e8re Poudrette) gave him special access to comb through piles of blasted rock. Sometimes he would go for months without finding anything interesting\u2014it depended where workers were blasting, and whether he showed up before they began carting rock away in heavy trucks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t always be there at the right moment. It was difficult. But with the number of times I went, I had the chance to make many discoveries,\u201d he told Maclean\u2019s<\/em> in a French-language interview, taking a break from his chief occupation of early fall: chopping firewood to heat his country home. \u201cThat I had such an impressive collection is because I kept almost everything that I found since the beginning. It\u2019s nice to collect, but you have to preserve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over 40 years that meant preserving some 16,000 pieces of rock. His best 8,000 or so specimens collected at Mont Saint-Hilaire\u2014ranging from fluorescent green-and-purple crystal arrangements that can fit in the palm of your hand, to geometrically intricate, rare crystallization patterns only viewable under a microscope\u2014have just been acquired by the Canadian Museum of Nature at a value of $4.5 million.<\/p>\n

The story of how Haineault\u2019s collection ended up a prize acquisition for a major Canadian museum\u2014billed as a \u201cnational treasure\u201d comparable to the sorts of National Art Gallery works more often in the headlines\u2014is a story about happy accidents and human curiosity.<\/p>\n

The first serious study of the area was conducted by a Geological Survey of Canada scientist in 1912. But if it wasn\u2019t for a commercial enterprise deciding to blast rock out of this largely nondescript hill for use in roadwork, construction and roofing shingles, the riches of the site would never have been discovered.<\/p>\n

Its rare characteristics would not be known if not for a small group of amateur and professional collectors, either, and their willingness to regularly tread into a quarry with steel-toe boots and sledgehammers for hours of unpaid physical labour. Some, like Haineault, spent almost all their free time over decades down at the quarry in their hard hats, all for the thrill of finding tiny mineral specimens. Or for the holy grail of having a mineral species named after you, like Haineaultite\u2014a pale yellow mineral, with prismatic crystals that have only been found as long as six millimetres.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the pride of all collectors to find a new mineral, in the hopes that one day you\u2019ll have your name given to a new mineral,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s quite important: I\u2019m going to be in the dictionary!\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u201cA basement of rocks? Oh, yeah. I\u2019ve been in quite a few people\u2019s basements where basically their house is half the quarry in flats and boxes and bins,\u201d Paula Piilonen says. \u201cThere are collectors like the Horvaths in Hudson, Que. Their backyard is just one big rock pile of Saint-Hilaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pickings at the quarry haven\u2019t been as good in recent years. Partly because of the type of rock the commercial operation is collecting. Partly because they can\u2019t go much further into the Mont\u00e9r\u00e9gie \u201cmountain\u201d of 415 m due to its other natural wonders. Much of it is conservation land owned by McGill University, recognized as a biosphere by UNESCO in 1978.<\/p>\n

To alleviate other collectors\u2019 disappointment, Haineault will sometimes dump some of his own Saint-Hilaire pile\u2014the sort of specimens that wouldn\u2019t make the cut in a museum collection\u2014back out onto the quarry floor, says Piilonen, who is a research scientist at the nature museum and president of the Mineralogical Association of Canada. \u201cHis garbage is\u2014to me, it\u2019s not garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Piilonen herself has a long history with Mont Saint-Hilaire, having bought her first specimen from there at the Sudbury Gem and Mineral Show when she was in Grade 12. She visited for the first time in third-year university to hunt for specimens, and studied its minerals for a Ph.D. thesis.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing high-tech about the collection process. \u201cBasically you would clamber over all the rock piles and roll boulders around and sledgehammer things open. If you find something, you work around it to get as much of the rock off without breaking the crystals that are sticking out,\u201d she explains. \u201cSometimes you\u2019re lucky enough to break through into a pocket\u2014a pocket\u2019s basically just a big geode, a big void space that minerals break into.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mont Saint-Hilaire is fascinating to researchers because it is what\u2019s known as an alkaline intrusion. The rock is created by a rare magma type that pulls in a wide array of elements, including rare earth elements, to fill the holes in its structure. As the magma cools and turns solid, diverse molecules come together in an attempt to stabilize themselves, forming unique chemical structures that repeat in a uniform pattern and form crystals.<\/p>\n

\"Haineault<\/p>\n

Haineault at his home in rural Quebec (Photograph by Sylvie Li)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A pocket in a pile of rock is like a needle in a haystack. Haineault, whose long-standing relationship with the quarry and obsession with its offerings meant he negotiated first dibs on certain blast areas, had a big advantage in finding them.<\/p>\n

It came to Piilonen\u2019s attention around 2013 that Haineault was seeking a permanent home for his collection. He wanted it to stay in Canada, preferably in Quebec. Luckily, the nature museum\u2019s research facility is in Gatineau. After seven years of planning, negotiation and fundraising, it finally came to pass, with the help of a new philanthropic funding vehicle called the Nature Foundation, and with Haineault donating specimens worth $1 million of the collection\u2019s $4.5-million value.<\/p>\n

Now, the best specimens, a majority of which he collected himself\u2014some were bought at symposiums and mineral shows over the years\u2014are preserved along with 52,000 other specimens owned by the museum. A small number of the most beautiful crystallizations from the Haineault collection, featuring bright pink, orange, blue and green crystals, will go on display across the river in Ottawa.<\/p>\n

It means fewer boxes in Haineault\u2019s home and an exciting research opportunity for Piilonen. \u201cWe have this suite of minerals at Saint-Hilaire that are very strange and very diverse because the chemistry is very strange and very diverse,\u201d says Piilonen.<\/p>\n

In total, 430 species of minerals are present at Saint-Hilaire, making it the most mineralogically diverse place in Canada, paralleled by only a handful of sites elsewhere in the world. Of those, 66 species were new discoveries, meaning their unique chemical structures have never been found elsewhere. Some are beautiful: carletonite, named after Carleton University, is known for presenting with a vibrant royal blue hue in rectangular, almost cubic crystal formations. Haineault\u2019s collection is expected to reveal more new species.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The minerals acquisition is a boon for research and a reminder of just how big a role \u201ccitizen science<\/a>\u201d and people\u2019s curiosity about their own backyards plays in our understanding of the natural world, says Meg Beckel, the president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Museum of Nature. \u201cLuckily, people who are curious love to share, and we love that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, minerals aren\u2019t just pretty to look at, whether with the naked eye or through a microscope. Their analysis has myriad applications in technology<\/a>, including lasers and optics. So do rare elements extracted from mineral deposits, crucial to cellphone manufacturing. A refurbished \u201cearth gallery\u201d at the nature museum will explain how minerals end up in your day-to-day life, Beckel says, like on your toothbrush.<\/p>\n

Haineault hopes researchers will be able to discover even more untapped potential. \u201cMaybe one day we\u2019ll discover a treatment against a virus using a mineral,\u201d he muses. \u201cYou never know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the November 2020 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cRock of ages.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#How a Quebec rock-collector amassed a multi-million-dollar \u2018national treasure’” Samples from Haineault\u2019s collection, including (clockwise from top left) analcime on microcline; an ice-cream scoop of leifite with serandite; catapleiite and natrolite; the slug-green-coloured sphalerite and albite; watermelon look-alike serandite and catapleiite; and the blue beauty fluorcarletonite (Courtesy of Gilles Haineault\/Canadian Museum of Nature) It was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/MINERALS-QUEBEC-SMITH-OCT19-01-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22974,77837,67806,19209],"class_list":["post-101658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-canada","tag-canadian-museum-of-nature","tag-editors-picks","tag-minerals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}