Geodiversity of the Saint-Étienne coalfield

from the Stephanian to the Anthropocene

This mineralogical exhibition organized within the framework of the association Histoire et Patrimoine de Saint-Étienne aims to discover the diversity of the geological materials of the Saint-Etienne coalfield in an educational way by insisting on the origin of the different rocks, the landscapes they evoke, their physical characteristics, their age, their usefulness (architectural buildings, economic activities of yesterday and today, mining, etc.).
It also aims to show that this geological natural heritage is current and alive because man, being at the origin of the formation of new rocks, already writes a new page of the local geological history. Hence the interest to enhance and preserve this natural heritage. The use of the term 'anthropocene' in the subtitle of the exhibition (geological epoch in which we live and which would have started when human influence on geology and ecosystems became significant on the scale of the history of the Earth) shows us how coal mining has marked and still marks the landscape of Saint-Etienne well after the end of coal mining, if only by the presence of several slag heaps (the "grimes") that punctuate our urban environment.
Saint-Étienne, where the Industrial Revolution began in continental Europe and which was at the head of the most important French coal basin in the early nineteenth century, played an important role in the history of French geology of the primary era. Indeed, the name 'Stephanian' was given to a geological stage of the carboniferous, the penultimate period of the primary era. This official international recognition devoted more than a century of studies devoted to our coal basin which was systematically studied by mining engineers like Louis-Antoine Beaunier who was at the head of the prestigious Ecole des Mines de Saint-LaurentÉtienne, founded in 1816 by Louis XVIII ( at the time, it was called the School of Minors).