Borzęckiite - second new mineral from the famous Miedzianka site (vicinity of Jelenia Góra, Lower Silesia, Poland) after uranophane, is finally accepted by the International Mineralogical Association. It took 169 years for Miedzianka - character of Filip Spinger's "Miedzianka. Historia znikania" [eng. "Miedzianka. The story of the disappearance"] - to have its history a bit "rewritten", in the form of another new mineral.

Borzęckiite was found in 1997 by our (me & Rafał Siuda, Ph.D. - the main author of the proposal and research) great colleague, Robert Borzęcki (www.redbor.pl) - mineral collector, museologist, and a person with enormous knowledge in the field of both the mining history of the Sudetes, and the Sudetes themself. Yet another person, another good colleague of ours - Piotr Gut - took part in the discovery. Borzęckiite quickly turned out to be a bit "obnoxious": to be sure, it's aggregates are seen by the naked eye. However, the nature of the intergrowths of its crystals made obtaining the full structural model impossible, even though different techniques - Single-Crystal XRD and synchrotron diffraction - we applied. Thus, one of us (Ł.K.) tried to address the structural parameters using Powder XRD data and the Rietveld method implemented in TOPAS software. Although doable, this approach was not enough to have the mineral approved, even though we got the chemistry by EPMA (electron microprobe) and FTIR data. The latter suggested borzęckiite not to bear any substantial amounts of hydroxyl groups, thus confirming our suspiction of it being the Pb analogue of guilleminite rather than of piretite.



At this moment of the story my private collection, kinda, helped here. I managed to obtain a specimen of ewingite - the most structurally complex mineral species (for now) - and published a Facebook post with its photoes. This happened to be interesting for the author of ewingite's original paper - Travis Olds, well-known specialist in the field of uranium minerals and their minerals. Travis immediately got interested in our potentially new material from Miedzianka. By using yet another technique - pseudo-Gandolfi diffraction - he managed to obtain a new batch of structural parameters. This, alongside with a great-quality Raman spectrum, allowed borzęckiite to enter mineral nomenclature.

At this moment I am, again, very thankful to Rafał Siuda for his motivation of continuing the research over borzęckiite even though the material proved to be "stubborn", and to Travis Olds, without whom the approval won't happen. In the meantime, hopefully, Miedzianka haven't said its last word in terms of new mineral species.