Mineral Mondays #57 - Chasing The Copper

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A few weeks ago I went out to check out some famous copper deposits in the Mojave desert. They are quite close to Los Angeles, but for some reason I had never gone out there to collect specimens. Having jet lag I decided to use insomnia to my advantage and get out into the desert before the sun came up and the temperatures start rising.

When I arrived I was greeted by this "fault" zone.

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The fault is where one part of rock slides past the other part of rock and produces a semi-flat surface. Since each side is not attached to one another It allows the minerals to seep in. Various geologic forces, like hydrothermal, will push the minerals into the space between the fault producing an orebody. I am always amazed when I see these and think of the geologic forces that produce them.

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This is the vein the miners were after.

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Here it measures about 12" wide, but may have been larger. It was interesting that they left this behind, but sunk a shaft least 20' deep right next to this spot.

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Luckily for rockhounds portions of the vein containing azurite and malachite were left behind. Even better, the tailings piles are littered with both minerals as well so there is little need to hard rock mine, you can just pick it all up.

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(Malachite)

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(Azurite)

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(Azurite & chrysocolla)

An interesting side note, our bodies use copper for many things like making connective tissue and regulating the nervous and immune systems. The human body contains between 1.4 and 2.1mg of copper per kilogram. You won't get rich off of recycling humans for copper though.

This was actually the last stop during my long day out in the desert. Next time I'll show the other, much larger copper mine I went to.

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Until then.....



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9 comments
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That's pretty sweet, to have such great stuff in the tailings pile to pick up! What a fun place! 😃

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For sure. I need to go back and chip away at that vein to see what I can find. It was too hot and the end of my day for me to try. It would be even better to get down into that stope to see what is down there.

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(Edited)

This is awesome, the azuriteand chrysocolla look so beautiful. I can imagine the experience you had at the desert seeing these beautiful views especially with the rocks.

Nice photography skill
#dreemer


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Thanks. It's always fund investigating new places and finding new minerals. Each time it gets more enjoyable too.

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Yeah, I saw the fun and I wish I could experience that too. Nice one sir 👍

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Wow. Those stones Azurite & chrysocolla are so amazingly beautiful. And that copper is part of the human body is another eye-opener for me from this post.
#dreemer

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Our bodies use many strange minerals. I was surprised about the copper in our bodies too and only found out about it upon doing some research for this post. Now I have to go look up how much gold our bodies have and use!

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Ahaha. Now, that's gonna be weird if we have gold in our bodies. That research, if true will raise the roof.

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Azurite and chrysocolla this rock just rocked; seems like your insomnia is being invested in phenomenal work. The description is interesting.
#dreemer

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