On a recent trip down to Tucson, we flew on Alaska Airlines. They were promoting their new mileage plan touting the changes and upgrades and wonderful reasons why one should join. All were, of course, terribly exciting; we couldn’t wait to sign up and be part of such an exclusive and thrilling program. Who wouldn’t want to join with their fellow members of the Titanium Level, especially if you linked it with being part of the oneworld (all lower case though I am not sure why) Emerald category? Life in the air would be pretty darned nifty.

I was envisioning the joy of joining when Marjorie brought me back down to earth by asking. “What exactly do those names mean? Is titanium really more prestigious and valuable than platinum? Should I feel better, from a mineralogical point of view, by being branded as sapphire or ruby?” I offered her a few platitudes (after all I was discussing platinum) but quickly realized I had just enough information to offer what I call “male-guy answer syndrome,” or spouting what I had recently learned or barely knew anything about, as if I were an expert. Turns out, those levels are not what they seem to be. Plus, they are an opportunity for me to write about rocks and minerals!

Titanium - A relatively new substance, titanium was not discovered until the 1790s. In 1791, a Cornish minerologist/reverend named it menachanite for the Cornish village of Manaccan (from the Cornish word for monk) where he located it. A year later a German chemist with a predilection for Greek mythology also discovered the mineral and gave it the name that stuck; apparently, people preferred ancient gods over those who dedicated their life to contemplation. Wildly plentiful, at least relative to other precious metals, titanium is the 9th must abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and a premier material in hip replacement. Titanium/oz = $45

Platinum - Spanish miners of the 16th century considered this unmeltable (at that time) element as useless, a material to discard. They knew it as platina, or little silver, or as Juan Blanco, a generic name for fool’s gold. By the 1800s, after platinum had reached the scientists of the Enlightenment, it became a treasured metal (King Louis XVI of France deemed platinum the only metal fit for Kings), primarily because of its scarcity and how hard it was to work. People still revere platinum for jewelry, but its primary use is for more prosaic items such as catalytic converters, dental fillings, and spark plugs. Platinum/oz = $1766

Silver - Often viewed as the ugly little sibling and second best to its superior, silver once again, in the eyes of the Atmos gang, heeds the higher ground to gold. And, yet, this malleable, ductile, highly reflective metal may have shaped the world more than its golden companion. After the Spanish arrived in the Americas, their desire for silver, and success in mining it (via enslavement), rewrote the distribution of power and trade across the globe. The result or so wrote two economic historians (and why would I doubt them?): “The singular product most responsible for the birth of world trade was silver.” Take that gold! Silver/oz = $81

Gold - Clearly our species has long coveted metals that we can bang, whack, and hammer, that are shiny and sparkly, that are just so darned pretty, and that can fuel one’s desire for wealth. No material meets these needs like gold, which we humans have coveted for thousands of years. One reason is the element’s malleability; a single ounce of gold can be pounded flat to a sheet covering 100 square feet, hence the wide use of gold leaf to adorn many a-less-than-lovely object. By the way, I was once paid in gold leaf, from the Klondike NHP. (I was also once given a chicken, after I gave a talk at an Audubon Society dinner, but that’s another tale for another time.) Gold/oz = $5055

Emerald - I have just a few rocks that I collected in college; one is a hexagonal, greenish blue crystal of beryl, the gem form of which is emerald. I found it on a field trip in Colorado at a place called the Devil’s Hole Pegmatite. (A pegmatite is the final gasp when magma hardens and crystallizes, often producing massive crystals and large walls of less crystalliferous minerals. For example, the DHP’s walls are rosy quartz with ginormous books of mica, some several feet thick.) At the Devil’s Hole Pegmatite, I discovered my one-inch wide crystal in the debris pile. It clearly was not an emerald, but I was still thrilled to find such a beauty.

Sapphire and Ruby - These two, glittery gems are far more common than you may realize. In fact, there’s a good chance that you have used them, or their equivalent, in a prosaic purpose far below their mythic status. The grit on sandpaper is often the mineral corundum (Al2O3), better known in its blue gem form of sapphire and red gem form of ruby. Corundum merits this use because it’s one of our planet’s hardest minerals, number 9 on the Mohs hardness scale. Diamond is number 10.

It truly is a sad state of affairs that geogeeks such as I are not involved more often in marketing and name development. It’s clear that we bring unique insights and connections that few others would recognize. Oh well. But suffice to say, at least, I can always find a way to turn the conversation to rocks!

TONIGHT - February 12, 2026 – Virtual – 6:00 P.M. – I will be chatting with my good pal Emily White, the Acquisitions Editor at Mountaineers Books about In the Range of Fire and Ice, my book (to be published in Sept 2026) about the Cascades. We’ll provide a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the book. Register here.

February 28, 2026 – Royal Room – Seward Park Audubon Center – 6:00 P.M. – I will be chatting with the wonderful Lynne Peeples about Wild in Seattle as part of the Audubon Center’s Urban Naturalist series. Here’s some info.

March 7, 2026 – Literary Lions – 5:00 P.M. – I am honored to be at this fine event supporting the King County Public Library System. Here’s some info.

Word of the Week - Corundum - Corundum comes from the Tamil language, kurundam, in reference to rubies. According to one John M. Woodward (1665-1728) in his 1719 catalogue of foreign fossils in his collection, what he called Nella Corvindum “is found in Fields where the Rice grows. It is commonly thrown up by Field Rats, and us’d as we do Emery, to polish Iron.”

Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe