Sylvite

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?


Sylvite
KCl
Sylvite is very soluble and crystals of this mineral are much rarer than crystals of salt (NaCl). The mineral is mined wherever it is found because it is of considerable industrial value for many applications including fertilizer where the potassium content is valued. Mining companies will go to great lengths to mine the material, sinking shafts more than 1000 feet through very difficult conditions to reach sizeable deposits of this mineral. The quickest way to tell if you have a specimen of sylvite rather than halite is just to lick it. Sylvite doesn’t quite taste like salt, but sort of. The mineral is not the most stable mineral, probably about like halite. If you have some, keep it in a dry place. Damp cellars or places where the humidity fluctuates will cause it to decompose, sometimes completely.
[Rock Currier, 1 January 2009]

Sylvite also occurs as a vapor deposit in high-temperature volcanic fumaroles,
(Alfredo Petrov, 22 July 2009)


Silvite
USA
New Mexico, The US Borax mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico, Carlsbad Potash district.


This mine has produced probably the largest number of crystal specimens of sylvite that are seen in collections today, although you don’t see many of them. Just another example of hundreds of specimens vanishing into the collections of people all around the world. Most of the specimens from this mine were collected by a mining engineer named Jim Minette. He worked for the mine and was an avid mineral collector. There were a few places in the mine where water seeping from the ore would collect in the bottoms of old stopes and gradually evaporate leaving the breakdown from the ceiling and the walls and bottoms of the stopes literally coated with millions of small sylvite crystals, that rarely exceeded an inch in size, but when collected would make nice hand specimens. Jim once took me underground in the mine, and they were fun to collect, but good knobs and bumps and mounds of crystals were not all that easy to collect as most of the surfaces were rather flat. Over the few years he worked there he must have collected at least several hundred specimens that he traded around for things to add to his collection.
[Rock Currier, 1 January 2009]


Silvite
USA
New Mexico, PCA mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico, Carlsbad Potash district.

Some miners were drilling holes in preparation for creating a raise in order to reach a different part of the deposit. Some of the holes started producing a lot of water continuously, but after a few days the water stopped. They raised into the area at the end of the holes and discovered an open pocket of giant halite and sylvite crystals. The pockets floor was covered with pink bubbly polyhalite. The halite crystals mostly were growing from the ceiling, quite transparent and some measured four feet in diameter. There were a few large octahedral sylvite crystals which were growing out of the polyhalite on the floor of the pocket, some of them weighed as much as 65 pounds. They were also transparent and white. The big halite crystals tended to be a little amber colored. At least that is the way they looked in the pictures. I saw one of the large sylvite crystals, but never got to visit the big pocket. The pocked was large enough to crawl into and even sit up in, but not large enough to stand up in. The pocket was perhaps 15 to 20 feet long. Very little material from this pocket was collected.
[Rock Currier, 1 January 2009]


Sylvite
Germany
Saxony-Anhalt, Pottash deposit, Stassfurt


We need someone to tell us about the sylvite crystals from Stassfurt.
[Rock Currier, 1 January 2009]

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.



Edited 15 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2009 04:37PM by Alfredo Petrov.

We should also mention that it commonly occurs as a high-temperature fumarole mineral (yes, high T, not in low T solfataras), although I've never seen a specimen - probably only micro?

Alfredo,
OK mention it! You have the authority to edit the article, go ahead and do it. If this thing takes off when the Best Minerals thread(s) take off we will need a seizable crew of moderators correcting the errors and adding all the good suggestions that users make. And of course those that make the best, most and most relevant suggestions will of course be kidnapped and placed in the moderators group. You don't think you are exempt from the Mann act do you?

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

There is a succession in the forming of "salt"layers: first calcite, anhydrite, then halite, and afterwards sylvine and salts of magnesium and Mg-K double salts.
In medieval times, halite was much sought after. When a mine was developed and they encounteredsylvine, it was useless and thrown away, whence the german name "abraumsalze" salts to be put aside. Later, in the 19th century when Liebig discoverd the role of K as a fertilizer, sylvine became the most wanted element, under the new name "Edelsalze" (noble salts) and halite was the mineral that was disposed of ( like in the French saltmines in the Alsace near the Rhine, where the salt was thrown in the Rhine, until the Dutch protested and the practice became forbidden).

Erich, That is interesting about the edehlsalz, but I think abraumsalz was any salt that was not halite. Can you refer me to some literature on the sequential formation of different kinds of salt that you talk about?

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.

Rock,

The problem is I wrote this reaction by heart. I learned it in a chemistry book in high school, and later I've read about it in a book by Semjonov, whose title in English may be something like 'The richesses of the Earth". But I remember the Dutch scholar Van 't Hoff did a lot of research about end of the XIX century.
You're right about the fact that Abraumsalze was any salt to be removed before they reached the desired halite. But in the sequence, you come from the upper layers down to the halite layer, and those luppers layers are ( if there hasn't been tilting or
reversing) the layers deposited after halite, in casu the K and Mg-salts.
And I know I'm not a native speaker (and writer) of English, but my language is Dutch, not German. Those 2 languages are related and the dialects grade from one language (Dutch in the Netherlands and the northern part of Belgium, Flanders, where I live) into the other, German in Germany. So, myname is Erik (in Dutch, but you find it also in the Scandinavian languages) and in German, it would be Erich.

Erich,
You don't need to apologize for not having flawless English. If it were not for my spell checker I would appear pretty dumb. It is your ideas and willingness to help that are the only important things here. Imagine what my old German would look like an a German speaking forum. I would not even consider trying to contribute something. Your English is plenty good enough to contribute here and anything that is not understood can be cleared up with questions. Thanks for the input.

Rock Currier
Crystals not pistols.