Quartz crystals with Ajoite inclusions Musina District - South Africa Ajoite is named after its type locality, the New Cornelia Mine in the Ajo District of Pima County, Arizona. Type material is conserved at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, USA, reference number 113220. In August 1941 Harry Berman [6] of Harvard University was collecting at Ajo, in Pima County, Arizona, USA. He found specimens of dark blue shattuckite, together with a bluish green mineral which he suspected was a new species. Berman and W T Schaller had planned to collaborate on the investigation of this mineral, together with other known copper silicate minerals, but Berman died in a plane crash in 1944, aged 42, before this study was done. It was not until 1958 that Schaller, together with Angelina Vlisidis (both of the US Geological Survey) studied the greenish mineral and determined that it was indeed a new species. They named it ajoite (pronounced ah-hoe-ite) after the place where it had been found. Twenty three years later, in 1981, George Chao from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, studied the mineral again, and showed that ajoite was triclinic, and not monoclinic as had been thought previously. His studies also resulted in a re-definition of the chemical formula Localities include Wickenburg and Maricopa County in Arizona, within the United States, and the Messina (Musina) District in South Africa. Quartz specimens from the defunct Messina Mines on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa are well known for their inclusions of blue copper silicate minerals such as shattuckite, papagoite and ajoite, but ajoite from American localities does not occur like this.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 01:21:19 +0000
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