4.9" Clear Quartz Crystals on Sphalerite - Peru

The Huanzala mine in the Bolognesi Province of Áncash, Peru is an excellent example of a mine with exceptional quality, variety, and availability. Traditionally a lead-zinc mine, Huanzala holds the record for the most mineral tonnage extracted by a single mine. This is quite the feat and it's easy to see why minerals from this locality are so aggressively mined and collected.

This mine has a multitude of awesome minerals from sharply terminated quartz to sparkly pyrite, bubbly aragonite and dense galena. Other common minerals are realgar, orpiment, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, manganoan calcite, rhodonite, rhodochrosite, cassiterite, barite, fluorite and fluorapatite, among other less prevalent minerals. Mineral associations from this mine often contain three to four minerals at once, growing all over one another in phenomenal associations.

Sphalerite is a part of the sulfide group and typically exhibits a grey/black appearance due to high concentrations of impurities. In its purest state, sphalerite's chemical composition is ZnS, and can display a gemmy transparent light tan/yellow color. This is one of the few minerals that can form crystals ranging anywhere between gemmy and transparent to opaque and metallic-like. Opaque or cloudy sphalerite tends to be most abundant since iron easily replaces zinc in the process of formation.