Elbaite from Pine River pegmatite, Florence County, Wisconsin, USA

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Dark bluish black radiating crystallized elbaite in a pegmatite matrix. Interesting locality example for the species. Collected in 1994.The Pine River pegmatite in Florence County, Wisconsin, is a rare-element granitic pegmatite system associated with the regional Paleoproterozoic tectonic events of the Penokean Orogeny, crystallized roughly 1.76 billion years ago. Geologically, it forms part of a complex group of highly fractionated LCT (lithium-cesium-tantalum) pegmatite dikes intruded into local metamorphic host rocks. The locality is famous among mineralogists for yielding an array of unusual phosphate, silicate, and oxide minerals, including spodumene, tantite, and behierite. While academic researchers and mineral collectors have studied and visited the area heavily over the decades, it has never been a commercially active or systematically mined industrial site, meaning it has no formal historical opening or closing dates as a mine.