A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about the copper that I found in the tailing pile of an old copper mine. For this post, I'd like to show you a few of the other rocks that I've collected from the tailing piles recently.
The rock that most of these old copper mines are dug into is primarily basalt formations. Basalt is a volcanic rock formed during massive lava flows. The copper and other minerals formed in voids or gas bubbles in the basalt that were left after the basalt cooled. I don't know much about the actual processes involved, just what I've read.
One of the more common minerals that filled in cracks and voids in the basalt formations is calcite. Calcite tends to form square crystals that can be seen when large broken specimens are found.
These are some of the rocks that I've collected.
Some of these rocks have calcite in them, the others have a greenish mineral that I'm not sure about. It might be prehnite, but I'm really not sure.
Some of my calcite rocks.
I think this rock has a bit of quartz formation along with the calcite.
This is my best calcite specimen. I picked this one up on the same day that I found the copper in the poor rock piles at the Cliff mine site. You can see the square shape of the calcite formation really well on this rock.
This rock has bands of what I think is prehnite along with a bit of copper in the prehnite. I edited this picture a bit to bring out the colors.
This is a piece of basalt with chlorite crystals filling the bubble voids in the basalt. I had to edit this picture a bit to bring out the colors.
I tend to collect rocks that I find interesting, these specimens are on display either in my room in the house or in the greenhouse. It tends to be easy for a rock collector to end up with too many cool looking rocks to be able to display them all, and I'm pretty close to that point now. :-)
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
