Crocoite

specimen number:
8822030

location:
Adelaide Mine, Dundas, Tasmania, Australia

description:
A loose grouping of lustrous orange-red crocoite. In good condition for one of these.

The Adelaide Mine in the Dundas mineral field of western Tasmania, Australia, was established during the late nineteenth-century mining boom, with the Adelaide Proprietary Silver Mining Company starting operations around 1891. Rather than operating continuously, the mine has experienced intermittent periods of opening and closing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, transitioning from early silver-lead extraction to specialized small-scale underground mining focused on world-class mineral specimens. Geologically, the deposit is situated within complex Cambrian and Precambrian metasedimentary and volcanic sequences. Its fame stems from the supergene oxidised zone of a primary lead-zinc orebody, where circulating groundwater reacted lead from galena with chromium derived from nearby ultramafic rocks to form cavities filled with brilliant orange-red crocoite crystals.

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