SpinelAmity giant spinel locality, Amity, Town of Warwick, Orange Co., New York, USA
Latitude: 41°15'22"N
Longitude: 74°27'15"W
The “giant spinel locality” was one of the earliest mineral collecting sites in the region, dating from the early 19th century. Shepard (1832) described single spinel crystals up to 158 Kg. Kearns (1977) says that this locality, his loc. 29, is also the probable type locality of edenite.
The minerals of the Amity-Edenville area occur almost exclusively in the Franklin Marble, a mid Protorozoic, granulite facies, calcite-rich metacarbonate. The Franklin Marble contains numerous horizons, often seen as isolated, elongated lenses but sometimes distributed in continuous trends. Some of these horizons are rich in aluminium and are characterized by corundum, spinel and brittle micas. Other, more limited, layers contain boron minerals or are rich in arsenopyrite. In the Amity-Edenville area there is a trend of spinel occurrences beginning at the Henry Rudy Farm and extending southwestward, parallel to the eastern fault boundary of the marble, into New Jersey. The “giant spinel locality” lies on this trend.
There is a voluminous literature concerning the Franklin Marble including recent papers that have led to a much tighter focus on the timing of geologic events, on the environment of deposition of the marble and on hydrothermal alteration/mineralization associated with post orogenic pegmatites.
References:
Kearns, L.E. (1977): The Mineralogy of the Franklin Marble, Orange County, New York. Ph.D thesis, Univ. of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.
Shepard, C. U., (1832) A sketch of the mineralogy and geology of the counties of Orange (N.Y.) and Sussex (N.J.), Amer. Jour. of Sci., ser. 1, V 21, pg. 321 -334.
Volkert, R. A., Drake, A. A., 1999. Geochemistry and stratigraphic relations of Middle Protorozoic rocks of the New Jersey Highlands. U. S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Paper 1565-C, 77
Volkert, R. A., Zartman, R. E., and Moore, P. B., 2005. U-Pb zircon geochronology of Mesoproterozoic postorogenic rocks and implications for post-Ottawan magmatism and metallogensis, New Jersey Highlands and contiguous areas, USA. Precambrian Research, 139, 1 – 19.
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