Davis Bunting
Staff Writer
Barbara Nash, professor of geology and geophysics, was recently honored with a newly discovered mineral, nashite, which was named after her.
Joe Marty, a retired medical technologist at the U, discovered nashite in April 2010 in the abandoned uranium mine of St. Jude in San Miguel County, Colo., although adequate samples could not be found and collected until February 2011 in Grand County, Utah.
Marty has collected about 2,000 of 5,000 known minerals. He has also discovered 30 new minerals, all as a hobby. Marty and three other researchers wrote the study describing nashite, and ultimately were the ones to name the mineral after Nash.
Because of rules regulating the naming of minerals, Nash was unable to directly research the new mineral.
“Barbara Nash had participated in other new vanadium minerals. But since we wanted to name this one mineral after her, she couldn’t participate. That’s not to say she didn’t review it,” Marty said.
Nash received this honor because of her involvement in the description of other newly discovered minerals and has directed the U’s Electron Microprobe Laboratory, which identifies the chemical makeup of elements within solid materials, since 1970.
“It’s a very nice honor to have a mineral named after you. Because it means, that in Barb’s case, that the analytical work that you do is very well regarded,” said Frank Brown, dean of Mines Earth Sciences College.
Nashite is a vanadium mineral group called decavanadates, but differs in appearance from other minerals in the group in its color.
“There is this absorption of light that yields this blue-green color. And most plus-five vanadium is a very bright yellow-orange, a strikingly beautiful color. This is an unusual vanadium to have this sort of blue-green color, so it’s kind of unique in that case,” Nash said.
While the discovery and naming of the mineral is substantial for both the university and scientific community, Nash and Marty do not think there is much practical use for the mineral.
“It’s rare, it’s small. There isn’t very much of it. If there were some use for it would be used up very quickly,” Nash said.