He began exploring the countryside for minerals and collecting crystals while a young boy at his family's summer estate in Crimea.

After graduating with honors from Odessa Classical Gymnasium in 1901, he attended the Mining Academy at Novorossisk, where he found the mineralogy courses so dull he attempted to switch his studies to Art History.

[5] In 1912, he taught what may have been the world's first courses in geochemistry, and also helped found Priroda (Nature), a popular scientific journal, to which he contributed throughout his life.

Numerous expeditions were organized, visiting the Urals, Crimea, Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Turkestan, the Altai Mountains, the Transbaikal region, northern Mongolia, Karelia, Tian-Shan, Kyzyl-Kum and Kara-Kum, and the Kola Peninsula.

The Kola Peninsula was notorious for its inaccessibility, but by the mid-1930s – due largely to the efforts of Fersman and his associate N.V. Belov – Khibiny and Lovozero were among the world's largest producers of a wide range of valuable industrial minerals.

[4] There were a number of IGC excursions, lasting 20–30 days, to major areas of geological interest within the Soviet Union; however, the Congress was held in 1937, during the Great Purge unleashed by Stalin.

Despite his regular contact with foreigners, Fersman managed to avoid suspicion, and the geological excursion to Karelia and the Kola Peninsula was described in glowing terms by C. S. Hurlbut of Harvard University.

[4] Fersman wrote more than 1,500 articles and publications on crystallography, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, geochemistry, geography, aerial photography, astronomy, philosophy, art, archeology, soil science, and biology.

In addition to his contributions to Priroda and other journals, he wrote many books for general audiences, including: Three Years beyond the Arctic Circle (1924); Mineralogy for Everyone (1928, updated and re-published 1935); Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Natural Science (1944); Reminiscences about Minerals (1945); The March of Soviet Science (1945); Geochemistry for Everyone (pub.