~ Early Web Links ~

The Fluorescent Mineral Society hosts a stunning photo gallery showcasing minerals from around the world photographed under shortwave, midwave, and longwave ultraviolet light, revealing their glowing colors. Specimens from famous localities like the Franklin and Sterling Hill mines in New Jersey, Tsumeb in Namibia, and sites across China, Australia, and Brazil are featured with photographer credits and mineral identification.

Amethyst Galleries' Mineral Gallery, self-proclaimed 'The First Internet Rock Shop,' is a comprehensive reference covering minerals, rocks, crystals, gemstones, and birthstones organized by chemical class and physical properties. With detailed explanations of mineralogy, crystal formation, and browsable indexes by name and category, it has been an authoritative online mineral encyclopedia since 1995.

The PALEOMAP Project, run by Christopher Scotese, is a comprehensive scientific resource illustrating the plate tectonic development of Earth's ocean basins and continents over the past 1.1 billion years. Visitors can explore full-color paleogeographic maps, interactive 3D PaleoGlobes, animations of ancient Earth configurations like Pangea, and download materials for geology education.

Hosted at Michigan Tech since 1993, this long-running volcano resource page gathers links to educational tools, research sites, webcams, and cultural materials related to volcanology from around the world. Visitors can explore active volcano feeds, teaching resources, folklore, myths, and interviews with real volcanologists, making it a rich hub for both students and enthusiasts.

Wasser-Wissen is a German-language internet portal dedicated to water and wastewater topics, featuring an A-Z encyclopedia, news, link directories, legal references, and resources on water management and environmental systems. The site covers everything from chemical elements relevant to water chemistry to sewage treatment plants, court rulings, dissertations, and international water management organizations.

Mineral Webzine is a bilingual French-English non-commercial online magazine dedicated to rockhounds, mineral collectors, and geology enthusiasts. Featuring photographs of specimens like garnet, wulfenite, and cinnabar contributed by collectors from Canada and France, it serves as a reference for mineralogy, crystallography, and gemology.

John Betts built this extraordinary virtual mineral museum housing over 194,000 photographs of more than 63,000 mineral specimens from localities around the world. With educational articles, field trip guides, searchable species and locality databases, and decades of collector expertise behind it, this site is an unparalleled reference for mineralogy enthusiasts.

Webmineral.com presents a comprehensive reference for the Nickel-Strunz Classification System, organizing over 4,700 minerals into a systematic hierarchy of chemical groups from elements and sulfides to silicates and organic compounds. Built with contributions from mineralogist James A. Ferraiolo whose classification scholarship dates to 1982, the site serves as a serious database tool for mineralogists, crystallographers, and collectors.

Lavajunkie.com is a passionate photography gallery dedicated to the volcanic activity of Kilauea, Hawaii, featuring extensive collections of lava flows entering the Pacific Ocean, surface flows, dawn shots, and even images purportedly showing the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele. With over 20 gallery pages organized into themed collections, this site captures the raw spectacle of new earth being formed and invites armchair lava junkies to experience the phenomenon from their screens.

Created by Ronnie Van Dommelen, this site is a dedicated reference guide to the mineralogy of Nova Scotia, Canada, covering locality information, mineral images, species studies, and reported minerals from the region. It highlights the province's world-class zeolites, Bay of Fundy collecting sites, and serves as an online resource for mineral enthusiasts and collectors worldwide.