Suddenly you can hear the rock starting to crack and small pieces of rock falling down. After a few hours the fire has burned down, and the mine is ready for breaking down the loose rock again. Students use hammer and chisel to break loose rock from the walls inside the Kongsberg silver mine. After lunch the students are taken to another silver mine to look for silver. The silver usually occurs in calcite veins together with fluorite, quartz, and pyrite.
Students use acid to identify calcite.
Students work in groups of five. Each group member looks for one property. One student uses acid to identify calcite, one uses a hammer to look for cleavage, one uses a knife to test hardness, another looks for colour, and another for lustre. At the same time they experience what miners were doing when searching for silver in the old times. The test was given to 200 Norwegian students in grades 3-7, half of whom had gone through both the Earth Materials Module and the museum program.