The Mica Mine

I don't know what prompted one of those occasional memory pictures this morning as I approached the dentist's surgery, nor why the subject should have been in the Namib desert near Windhoek, but it was exceptionally sudden and vivid.

We had booked a tour with a local company but, since we were the only people to turn up, our guide, Ernst, asked us what we would like to do. I indicated an interest in geology so he drove us east to a big uranium mine which declined to take us on a tour so, instead, Ernst headed into the desert where....

....he knew of a very different mine.

This is a mica mine, mica being a mineral whose atomic structure causes the crystals to cleave into thin, pliable sheets. Mica has many uses, particularly as a thermal and electrical insulator, but in the old days....

....it was used to form the windows in furnaces, for which this deposit, with 'books' of mica over 300mm wide, would have been ideal.

All the indications were that this mine had been long abandoned - certainly Ernst didn't know much about it - which left us wondering who had travelled out into this unforgiving environment to work in broiling temperatures to win this mineral.