Catalog Search Guide
You can search our catalog using different mineral attributes. For example, you can search by color such as green, yellow or purple, or by chemical elements such as uranium, calcium or iron, or by mineral groups such as phosphate, silicate or carbonate. You can also filter by crystal habit like crystal, geode or crystal on matrix, by specimen size such as thumbnail, small, medium or cabinet, and by features such as radioactive or fluorescent minerals.
Norway
Norway's mineral wealth is rooted in one of Europe's most varied geological settings: ancient Precambrian gneisses and amphibolites of the Baltic Shield, reworked during the Caledonian orogeny, and cut by the Permian Oslo Rift, whose alkaline intrusions created some of the richest pegmatite fields on the continent. This span of terranes, from deeply metamorphosed southern basement rocks to the nepheline syenite plutons of the Oslofjord, has made Norway a type locality for dozens of species and a long-standing benchmark source for serious mineral collectors.
The Kongsberg silver mining district, worked from 1623 to 1958, is considered by many Norwegian collectors to have produced the best native silver specimens in the world, period, with more than 1.3 million kg of silver extracted from veins associated with sulphide-rich fahlbands. Further south, the Evje-Iveland pegmatite district in Setesdal is famous for its hundreds of feldspar and quartz quarries, chief among them the Landsverk mine, source of vivid green amazonite feldspar, along with beryl, gadolinite, thortveitite, columbite, xenotime and fergusonite, with over 100 species recorded across roughly 400 individual pegmatite bodies. Along the Oslofjord, the Langesundsfjord district and the Larvik Plutonic Complex rank among the world's classic agpaitic alkaline provinces alongside Ilímaussaq, Khibina, Lovozero and Mont Saint-Hilaire, with 32 valid mineral species first described from its syenite pegmatites, including mosandrite, catapleiite, låvenite and various eudialyte group minerals, most famously from the historic Låven pegmatite.
Elsewhere, Telemark is the type region for thulite, the manganese-bearing pink variety of zoisite first described from Kleppan near Sauland, while the Bamble and Kragerø areas add apatite, phenakite and titanite to Norway's list of collector species, and the historic cobalt and nickel workings of Modum and Evje round out a mining heritage stretching back centuries. It is this combination — genuine type localities, centuries-old silver and pegmatite mines, and an unusually agpaitic alkaline geology rarely matched outside Greenland or Russia — that makes Norwegian specimens, from lustrous Kongsberg silver wires to gemmy Evje-Iveland amazonite and rare Langesundsfjord rare-earth silicates, so consistently sought after by serious mineral collectors and museums alike.
