Royal School of Mines Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

The Department of Geology has its origins in the Museum of Economic Geology, a collection of minerals, maps and mining equipment made by Sir Henry De la Beche, and opened in 1841. The Museum also provided some student places for the study of mineralogy and metallurgy. Sir Henry was the director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and when the collections outgrew the premises the Museum and the Survey were placed on an official footing, with Government assistance. The Museum of Practical Geology and the Government School of Mines Applied to the Arts, with its Geology Department, opened in a purpose designed building in Jermyn Street in 1851. The officers of the Geological Survey became the lecturers and professors of the School of Mines (renamed the Royal School of Mines in 1863). Sir Andrew Ramsay was appointed to the first Chair of Geology in 1851 and retired in 1876. The department moved to South Kensington in 1877, and was transferred from the Royal College of Science to the Royal School of Mines in 1966.
The Technology of Oil (later Oil Technology) programme was established in 1913, with Applied Geophysics being introduced in the 1930s. Previously, the Departments of Physics, Mathematics, Meteorology and Chemistry had contributed towards research in Geophysics. Geochemistry studies were first undertaken in the Department in 1948, leading to the establishment of the Geochemical Prospecting Research Centre in 1954 (by 1965 the Applied Geochemistry Research Group). In the early 1970s Oil Technology was divided into Petroleum Geology and Petroleum Engineering, with the latter being incorporated into the Mineral Resources Engineering Department of the Royal School of Mines.
In 1998 the T H Huxley School of Environment, Earth Sciences and Engineering was formed from the Department of Geology, Earth Resources Engineering, the Centre for Environmental Technology and the Environment Office.

The Murchison Museum was disbanded in 1990.