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Trinity College Dublin collection available as an OER

We're making another university teaching collection into an Open Educational resource. Here it is. Many thanks to Balz Kamber, Emma Tomlinson and Ian Sanders, and to Trinity College Dublin for funding that helped put the collection together, and for permission to open it to everyone.  We have several university thin section collections on the VMfES site, but they are only visible if you log in using the appropriate password.

This collection of virtual thin sections includes igneous and metamorphic rocks from the UK and around the world. The collection consists of eleven thin sections from the Trinity College teaching collection, ranging from rocks as young as a 1974 eruption on Etna, to ancient Lewisian gneisses from Scotland that are over two billion years old. If you're looking for Irish rocks check out the two mica granite from Walsh’s Quarry, Three Rock Mountain, County Dublin.


The total number of rocks available as open educational resources has now topped 200 and we are hoping to post more collections early in 2014, including ‘British Meteorites’, a collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London.