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RE: Nature Identification Thread #7- Now Paying out Steem Basic Income Memberships to participants
Ok, here's my ante for this post.
I found this duringy field camp in Northern New Mexico. It was in a tailings pile outside the Champion mine. Prospectors hoped to mine copper, but there was never a big enough deposit found to warrant opening a full mine.
I'm pretty sure I know what it is, but I want to see if you can guess it. The rock is massive, no discernable grain boundaries. It can scratch your hammer. It does not react to HCL. The colorful part appears teal (not turqouise). It was formed in an area known for regional metamorphism. High grade schist and folded terrain are common. What could it be?
Quartzite with some copper mineral (based on the green color)? I've definitely seen both massive and non-massive quartzite, and the hammer scratching/ non-HCl reactivity seems indicative.
The green mineral is the tricky bit- if it were a copper mineral, I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it was a sulfide or oxide. The schists and the (what I think is quartzite) slightly bias me against the copper being a sulfide from a hydrothermal system, and make me think it's more likely disssolved copper oxides deposited in the sedimentary protoliths by water moving through the rock.
Great guesses. This piece is very likely part of the copper-rich quartz vein they were hunting at the champion mine. So I would say its not quartzite, but quartz since it deposited in a vein rather than being metamorphosed into a quartzite.
As for the greenish blue mineral, the locals called it azurite. I doubt that, it's the wrong color. My guess is chrysocolla, which is a hydrous copper silicate. There were no sulfide minerals spotted in the area.
It does look like chrysocolla, now that you mention it! And yeah, I totally forgot that copper silicates were an option too.
I guess I just automatically assumed that it was metamorphosed from the schist mentions.
Very cool!
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Thanks! I appreciate it. I'll sign up for the Steemit basic income. I also have plenty more rocks for you to look at in the future ;)