When it comes to gems, Rachelle Turnier MS’17, PhD’22 knows her stones inside and out. With a doctorate in geology, she can talk chemical makeup and crystalline structure. As the museum manager for the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), she is a steward of the collection and studies sapphires from Montana, Myanmar, and basalts. She shares her insights about gems, gemology, and the many shades of sapphires.
What brought you to the UW?
I came to study with [Charles R. Van Hise Professor Emeritus of Geology] John Valley, who’s the one of the best in his field. The UW has an incredible SIMS isotope lab, and I had gotten interested in sapphire geochemistry during my undergraduate. I actually interned at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with their curator there studying Burmese sapphires, and I got really interested in the geochemistry. I started taking some short courses about secondary ion mass spectrometry, which is the instrument in [Valley’s] lab. And I just got hooked. John is the best, having this crazy legacy of analyzing the oldest zircon. I’m a California girl, but I was like: all right, I’m going to Wisconsin. And I loved it. I loved every day.
What’s interesting about sapphires?
I'm a sapphire specialist. It’s such a chemically simple mineral. It’s just aluminum and oxygen. Yet to get conditions in the [Earth’s] crust — in the mantle — that are right to form, it’s actually quite rare and quite interesting. There are different colors [and] different deposits around the world. Montana is probably my favorite sapphire locality. I’ve done field work there a couple times now. They come naturally in this really beautiful cornflower blue color or teal colors that are just spectacular. Then there’s Madagascar. There’s Nigeria. Australia is very big. They’re even in Greenland. They’re not very gemmy but they're very old. And of course, many sapphires are sourced from Southeast Asia: Burma, Thailand, Cambodia.
You mentioned rubies — aren’t those different from sapphires?
Chemically, ruby [is] the red variety of sapphire, but it’s been called “ruby” for such a long time that we’re not going to get rid of the name ruby and just call it red sapphire. Ruby has high chromium compared to other trace elements in the crystal structure, and this causes the red coloration. Every other color is lumped into [the name] sapphire. Even pink corundums are called sapphire. Sometimes they refer to them as “fancy-colored sapphires” because in the olden days, sapphire meant blue.
What do you do as the GIA museum manager?
A lot of the day-to-day is focused on exhibits and the gem and mineral library, but I have access to this incredible gem collection. I still have time to do my research and publish things. I get to do it on my own pace and time. There’s just a lot of opportunity in my role, from facilitating the use of the collection for research and education as well as acquiring new donations. It’s nice being in a smaller museum that is also a lab and also a school because I get to interact with people and see the direct result of exhibits that we set up, the classroom loans I arrange, the cleaning that I do. I keep things beautiful.
What’s the most interesting thing in the museum right now?
There’s a handmade silver fish with sapphires, diamonds, tsavorite and 18-karat gold. It was handcrafted by Almaza Jewelers in Texas. It’s one of 24 different sea creatures that this gentleman has made, and we’ve installed them into an aquarium for display. We have exhibits, but we’re also a library. We’re actually a very highly used museum. Our specimens are often photographed and used in teaching materials. And we’re a research facility and make [scientific] instruments. It’s awesome.
