Abstract The Mössbauer effect is the recoilless absorption and emission of γ rays by specific nuclei in a solid, and provides a means of studying the local atomic environment around the nuclei. It is a short-range probe, and is sensitive to (at most) the first two coordination shells, but has an extremely high energy resolution that enables the detection of small changes in the atomic environment. Mössbauer spectroscopy therefore provides information at the atomic level. There are numerous textbooks and review chapters written about Mössbauer spectroscopy. A starting point is the previous chapter in this volume ( Amthauer et al. , 2004 ), and other reference sources directed at mineralogists include Bancroft (1973) , Hawthorne (1988) and McCammon (2000) . The main objective of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to Mössbauer spectroscopy applications in mineralogy. The approach is intended to be instructional rather than encyclopaedic in nature, so emphasis is placed on worked examples that are chosen to complement the theory presented in the previous chapter. Studies of the 14.4 keV transition in 57 Fe comprise more than 95% of mineralogical Mössbauer investigations; hence this chapter is focused exclusively on 57 Fe. Methodology The fundamentals of Mössbauer methodology can be found in the previous chapter as well as any textbook devoted to Mössbauer spectroscopy ( e.g. Bancroft, 1973 ; Gütlich et al. , 1978 ), so only those aspects relevant to the present chapter are outlined briefly below.