Hermeloite or the worldwide discovery of a mineral by three friends in Galicia

There is no collector in the world who can show off a piece of ermeloite in their windows.

The first fragment has been analyzed and identified at the University of Santiago (USC), it weighs no more than a few milligrams and was found by three friends with a long-standing passion for mineralogy and many mountain days in their boots.

The love for minerals is widespread among the human species, but it takes many forms, from those who adore precious gems that can adorn their ears to the child who keeps small pieces of the planet bought at a fair in a tin box.

Possibly many of the great amateurs of mineralogy began in the latter way.

And it is people like this who continually take samples to the Archaeometry and Materials Characterization Unit of the USC, a department that in the last 20 years has carried out some 5,000 analyzes and that also studies archaeological remains.

Its manager, Óscar Lantes Suárez, says that the discovery of an unknown mineral “is not a matter of chance”: “you have to be lucky, yes”, but it is “continuous work” and having woven a dense network of “collaborators ” that comb the orography that sometimes gives rise to these surprises.

This is how José Carlos Rodríguez Vázquez, Moisés Núñez and Manuel Cerviño collected on Mount Ermelo (Moaña, Pontevedra) the only known sample —and until now not registered in any international database— of a mineral that has been baptized with the toponym of the enclave in which it appeared.

“Ermeloite is a monohydrate aluminum phosphate”, from the kieserite group, and at first glance it is “easy to confuse” with other minerals;

but "it is the structure, the order", emphasizes Lantes, "what makes it a new species".

The appearance of the ermeloite is that of "an externally powdery, but compact, and internally crystalline mass" of a whitish color, explains the scientist who acts as spokesperson for the entire team that has discovered the new mineral.

The tiny size of the sample, converted into a national reference specimen, put the researchers to the test and limited the possibilities of analysis.

For example, "the physical and mechanical characteristics of the ermeloite are still to be explored," says Óscar Lantes.

And furthermore, the time has not yet come to investigate possible applications, because no other location is known and in Moaña only a "nodule within a pegmatite" has appeared.

After collecting the millimeter sample, its three discoverers, great amateurs of mineralogy, did not find any more on the surface.

According to Lantes,

perhaps it would be necessary to remove mountains to come across other small whitish nodules trapped in rocks, and that is something that "minerologists do not do".

Most of these scientists, he defends, "are respectful of the environment", and are content to take advantage of the opportunity and visit "the edges of a mine" or road works "where large slopes are cut".

Guillermo Zaragoza, a technician from the X-ray unit at USC, and the biologist Carlos Rodríguez, who collected the hermeloite on Mount Ermelo.

Mineralogy is almost a religion that gathers its followers in congresses, fairs and forums where exchanges take place.

"We do the laboratory analysis," explains the head of the USC department, "and for that, many years of experience and skill are required to refine the techniques."

But many minerals reach the Archaeometry and Materials Characterization Unit, according to Lantes, "because there are people who have collaborated with the university for a long time, people who know how to read the field very well, who know what can be found in each place and notices strange things.

After Rodríguez, Núñez and Cerviño collected the sample on Mount Ermelo, staff from the Research Infrastructure Area of ​​the University of Compostela carried out X-ray diffraction analyzes and confirmed the suspicion that it was a "worldwide finding".

Ermeloite, officially recognized by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA), is the fourth mineral discovered in Galicia since the 19th century.

The previous ones were the morenosite, the bolivarite and the cervantite.

The team led by Lantes also studied the composition and particular characteristics of the ermeloite with calorimetric techniques and other technologies such as X-ray fluorescence spectrometry or Raman spectroscopy.

Although the small size of the type specimen makes it "complicated to infer possible industrial or technological applications", the USC pointed out in the statement with which it disseminated the finding, "it is not ruled out that from this discovery it is possible to identify this mineral species in similar environments. in other geological formations in the world.

The ermeloíta that the Galician university guards will be exhibited in 2023, next summer, in a mineralogical sample based in the Pazo de Fonseca (Santiago).

Then, it will be deposited "permanently" in the Museum of Natural History of the USC itself.

As if they had been inspired for the title by the discovery of the ermeloíta (

), Óscar Lantes and the director of the Museum of Natural History, Marcos Andrés González, are coordinating a project to disseminate this science until the end of the year coming.

The new mineral discovered on that mountain from which the Vigo estuary can be seen arrives just in 2022, an international mineralogical year dedicated, for the 200th anniversary of his death, to the Frenchman René Haüy, father of mineralogy and crystallography, whose name is inscribed on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower.

The University Museum of Santiago preserves the original collection of wooden crystallographic models made by Haüy himself.

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