ROM seeks $3M endowment for geology curator

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is trying to raise an initial $3 million to hire and endow in perpetuity a geology curator for its earth sciences department — a position that has been vacant for more than 20 years.

“Three million dollars is our starting point,” Kathryn De Carlo tells The Northern Miner from the museum’s basement.

De Carlo works on the ROM’s philanthropy team. She stands in front of a large display case containing rocks, minerals and gems, along with museum staff Ian Nicklin and Veronica Di Cecco.

Nicklin is one of the people responsible for taking care of the museum’s four collections: mineralogy, petrology, meteorite and gem. He specializes in meteorites. Di Cecco is the museum’s mineralogy research technician.

“If things were really good,” De Carlo continues, “I’d say, ‘Let’s add on a couple million for research and education programs so that person would have some room to do the things that they need to do.’”

From left to right: Veronica Di Cecco, Ian Nicklin and Kathryn De Carlo share a laugh in the earth sciences department of the Royal Ontario Museum. Credit: Richard Quarisa.

One such thing would be to build a geology gallery at the museum.

The museum has a mineralogy display that Di Cecco calls the “art house of the earth,
with all the cool minerals and beautiful pieces of nature’s art.”

“But it’s not telling the story of how the earth formed,” she adds.

To fund the gallery initiative, the ROM would need to raise another $10 million.

The new storage units the museum built after acquiring the Kirwin collection are set on rails and can be moved by spinning a wheel. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

The ROM has 30,000 petrology specimens, 70,000 mineralogy specimens, 2,000 gemology specimens and 600 meteor specimens. It ranks in the top 10 worldwide in terms of size, diversity, value to science and education, and depth and representativeness. It goes back 104 years to when the museum first opened, and includes the Kirwin collection, which the museum acquired in 2014.

Assembled by geologist Douglas Kirwin, the Kirwin collection contains more than 21,000 minerals and ores from 47 countries and 600 mines. Kirwin didn’t collect all of them himself. He had help from some friends.

“He’d say, ‘Hey Joe, you’re working on this important deposit, send me this this and this from there,’” explains Nicklin, who was involved in the acquisition.

Kirwin amassed the collection over more than 40 years, keeping it in a separate house next to the one where he lived with his wife on the outskirts on Bangkok. Nicklin says Kirwin always intended to give it to an institution, but wanted to find the right one. He didn’t want to donate it to a company because he wanted to make sure students would have access to it, but he also didn’t want to give it to a university, preventing exploration companies from accessing it.

“We’re kind of in the middle,” Nicklin says.

The museum raised $4 million over three and a half years to fund the acquisition and build a storage facility.

A dying rock that burned itself when off-gassing sulphuric acid. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

The new storage system more than doubled the museum’s storage capacity. Before, it kept all its minerals in wooden cabinets, some of which dated back to 1924, when the museum first opened. However, humidity flux was quite high, damaging some of the minerals through a process called off-gassing, where sulphuric acid forms and the specimen, essentially, starts eating itself.

The new cabinets are metal and seal shut. The bulk are kept in a main room where humidity can rise as high as 60%. It stores specimens that can’t handle the humidity — sulphides, mostly — in the “dry room.”

“It’s 25% humidity — like Arizona,” Nicklin says.

During my visit to the ROM, I was encouraged to touch some of the specimens — geology is a tactile science, Veronica and Ian told me repeatedly. The first rock I touched, housed in the display case behind Kathryn, looked like the kind of material a homeowner would choose for their kitchen countertop. It was found in the Northwest Territories and is 4 billion years old. It is the oldest known rock formed on earth.

“I can show you even better,” Di Cecco promised.

In the dry room, Ian gave me a piece of a meteorite called the Allende meteorite, so-called after the place it was found in Mexico (all meteorites are named after where they are found, Ian tells me). It was small and round, with a circular calcium aluminum inclusion on its face.

“The fun thing about those,” Nicklin says, as Di Cecco and De Carlo stand grinning around me, “is you can find microscopic mineral grains in there, extract grains and get a date of 4.567 billion years old. That’s about the oldest thing we know of in our solar system.”

A chunk of Acasta Gneiss, the world’s oldest rock, recovered from the Slave craton in the Northwest Territories. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

The dry room at the ROM hosts cabinets with drawers full of martian meteorites. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

Next they placed a meteorite from Mars into my hand. And then one from the Moon.

“I love these things,” Nicklin says. “They turn everybody into an eight-year-old. You can bring the most jaded 14-year-old boy in here, give him that, and he’s an eight-year-old kid.”

A focus for the earth sciences initiative at the ROM is to educate students about geology, and inspire them to pursue a career in the field. The museum hosts more than 140,000 students each year on extracurricular trips, and says a geology gallery is one way to get people excited about becoming geologists. One day it hopes to host Skype lectures with students around the world, showing off its collection.

The calcium aluminum inclusion on the Allende meteorite is visible on the upper left side of the face. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

“The way I got into geology is that as a kid my mom would take me to this museum every weekend,” Di Cecco says. “And I would hang out in the mineral gallery and the geology gallery when it existed, and I loved it.”

Nicklin offers another example:

“A huge portion of our meteorite collection has been given to us by one fellow, a doctor who became passionately interested in meteorites coming here on a Grade-Eight field trip when he was a kid. He touched his first meteorite, sparked a lifelong interest, and now he’s giving back.”