Can you help make this a better article? What good localities have we missed? Can you supply pictures of better specimens than those we show here? Can you give us more and better information about the specimens from these localities? Can you supply better geological or historical information on these localities?
Chambersite
Mn3B7O13Cl
Here will go general comments about chambersite specimens and the localities that they come from.
The diameter of the well that was drilled into the salt dome was probably not much more than six inches. Possibly members others here on min dat could pin than down much closer than I could. (But obviously, stories about divers going down into the salt dome to hunt for chambersite crystals are total fiction.) I don't know if they were taking cores of the rock formations out of the well as they drilled or if they simply drilled and flushed out the broken and crushed rock. These "returns" were run into a little pond and it was in the sediment at the bottom of the pond (one that it would hard to drown in) in which the chambersite crystals were found. The first collector to find them made a great hit. They were probably the largest crystals of the mineral that have been found to date. In those days I am sure the little pond where the well returns were run must have been wide open and all you had to do to get them was to wade out into the muck and scoop it up and go through the mud for the crystals. Pretty easy collecting. The largest chambersite crystal in my collection is one I got when I bought Are Eadies rare species collection (Rock Currier). It measures about 12 mm in diameter and he got it from a fellow named Mitchel in 1965.
The original descriptive paper for chambersite gives 12mm as the maximum size, so Rock Currier's might be the biggest one, or close to it. The largest one pictured here on Mindat (Kelly Nash collection) is 11mm, obtained from a G K Ebanks in 1957, the year they were first found. I don't know whether Ebanks field collected some himself, or got it from B F Dyer Jr, whom the paper mentions as the original finder. Even in those relatively liberal days I don't think the site was wide open to collecting, as the authors state they got permission to collect from Texas Natural Gasoline Corp, so the number of field collectors of this stuff might have been quite limited. Fred Pough and his wife collected many crystals in the swamp at a later date - Anyone happen to know which year? ...or whether Pough found any that were larger than the published 12mm size? Pough told me (Alfredo Petrov) once that he thought there had been larger ones, but they tended to explode after reaching the surface, because of high pressure inclusions (presumably gaseous?).
Alfredo Petrov
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2009 08:35AM by Rock Currier.
