How gypsum is quarried

Gypsum is a mineral so soft you can scratch it with a fingernail, and it holds water inside its crystals.

stations: 3
things downstream: 10

The short version

Gypsum is a soft calcium sulfate mineral that forms thick beds when seawater or salty lakes dry up. It is dug from open quarries or underground mines, crushed and sorted. Heating it later drives off the water locked in its crystals, leaving the powder called plaster of Paris.

Quarry the evaporite bed

Gypsum forms thick, extensive beds in sedimentary rock where water evaporated long ago. Quarries drill and blast the beds, or underground mines follow them.
Crush to chips

Quarried rock is crushed and screened. Because gypsum is soft, it breaks down without much effort.
Sort for the plant

Material is graded by purity and size. Most of it goes to a plant that heats it to make plaster, or sets it into wallboard, and some goes to farms as a soil amendment.

End of the lineGypsum Next it goes into cement, drywall, plaster of paris and 2 more.

Worth repeating

Heating gypsum drives off water and leaves plaster of Paris, named for the quarries of the Montmartre district of Paris.
Gypsum crystals called selenite can grow up to 12 m long, among the largest crystals found in nature.
At White Sands National Park in New Mexico, 710 square kilometers of the dunes are made of gypsum sand.