Chrysocolla ps. after Malachite with Quartz and Malachite - image 1

Chrysocolla ps. after Malachite with Quartz and Malachite

$2,500.00

$40.00 shipping
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Tucson, Arizona, USA

7,543 for sale·132 sold

This specimen from the Tenke-Fungurume area in the Kolwezi mining district, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is both beautiful visually and beautifully complex geologically. Comprising an attractive array of pale blue bladed crystals rising up from matrix it is only when one realises what these crystals are, or should I say "were" that the complexity arises. These are blades of Chrysocolla - an amorphous copper silicate - coated with a fine layer of colourless Quartz crystals, but Chrysocolla does not form crystals, let alone freestanding bladed crystals. The Chrysocolla is a pseudomorph, or replacement, of Malachite, but Malachite does not form bladed crystals like these either! So, the Malachite was also a pseudomorph, but probably after bladed Azurite, meaning that these are Quartz coating Chrysocolla pseudomorphs after Malachite pseudomorphs after Azurite. One other suggestion I have seen is that these are pseudomorphs after bladed monoclinic Gypsum (Selenite) crystals, but trying to explain the replacement of calcium sulphate with copper carbonates and copper silicates is far more challenging. Wonderfully complex and strikingly beautiful.