Millersville’s Geology Club traveled to the New Paris Mine at the New Paris Quarry in Bedford County, Pennsylvania on Sept. 27. Students traveled to the mine at 9:00 a.m. and arrived back at Millersville at 5:00 p.m. Students were encouraged to search for minerals and fossils present in the boulders they were around.
“We chose to visit the New Paris mine because there are fantastic calcite and fluorite minerals, as well as fossils such as trilobites, brachiopods and eurypterids,” wrote Isaac Stapler, the President of the Geology Club.
The New Paris Quarry has been closed as a commercial site for years, but now it runs as a geoscience educational site.
“We were able to have this opportunity because of Stephen Lindburg, an adjunct geology professor at Pitt-Johnstown, who graciously offered to host us for free,” wrote Stapler. “Once we arrived, we met up with him, and he gave us a brief history of the location and the geology of the site. Afterwards, we spent the next few hours searching through the boulders for any minerals and fossils we could find.”
It is important to be aware of regulations and location requirements when rockhounding on a trip such as this.
“The process for rockhounding varies depending on the location and what is found there; however, it always starts with making sure you have permission to collect on the land you are going to,” wrote Stapler. “Luckily we already had permission because the quarry has been closed since the late ‘90s and has since been designated by the state as a geological education site and allows for people to come in and do research and collect samples.”
Students on this trip were able to walk away with a variety of minerals and fossils for the keeping. According to Stapler, “finding the minerals didn’t take too much effort since the majority of what we were digging through was the rubble from the high wall of the mine that was blown up a few years ago and the calcite, fluorite veins, and crystals were very visible from the surface.”
This trip marks an important time for the Geology Club’s activities with members from campus. “It is very important to have these types of trips, because in the last few years since COVID, we have had a very hard time being able to go to places such as this and having the turnout that we did,” wrote Stapler. “The turnout we had on this trip gives us some reassurance that the club can hopefully get resurrected to what it once was before COVID and will be able to go on larger trips, with more people in the future and create a better and larger community of people on campus that are interested in geology.”
The Geology Club hopes to host one or two more trips, with aims to travel to Hartford, Connecticut next semester for the annual Northeastern division Conference of the Geological Society of America.
For more information, find the Geology Club on Instagram @mu_geologyclub or their Get Involved page.
