Three years beyond the Arctic Circle. Travels in search of a stone

Academician Alexander Evgenievich Fersman (1883-1945)-the famous Russian natural scientist, mineralogue, one of the founders of geochemistry, “poet of stone”, a full member and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, a member of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society-stands on a par with the most outstanding representatives of the world Sciences.
In our country, Fersman probably visited everywhere: from the Caucasus and the Kola Peninsula to the Far East. But the most expensive places on the map of the country for Fersman were Khibiny, Central Asia and the Urals. Since 1920, Fersman with a group of students and young geologists conducted several expeditions in the then deserted region of the Kola Peninsula - Khibiny. The travelers proceeded the mountains and swamps of the Khibinsky tundra, suffered in the mountains from storms and fogs, in the swamps - from mosquitoes that corroded their face and hands. But all the difficulties paid off the opening of a global scale of the huge Apatite deposit - a stone of fertility containing phosphorus. In the Karakum desert expedition