Antimony

specimen number:
2282059

location:
Tom Moore Mine, Kern Co., California, USA

description:
A solid bright massive lustrous native antimony.

The Tom Moore mine, situated in the Erskine Creek district near Lake Isabella in Kern County, California, is a historic base-metal locality primarily known for its unique antimony mineralization. Geologically, the deposit consists of steep hydrothermal quartz veins that cut through fine-grained metasedimentary host rocks belonging to the localized metamorphic basements of the southern Sierra Nevada. The primary ore mineral is stibnite, which occurs alongside heavy masses of native antimony, both of which have undergone localized supergene weathering to form an array of secondary antimony oxides like valentinite, stibiconite, and cervantite within the near-surface zone. Small-scale underground operations and exploratory tunneling at the site began intermittently during the late nineteenth century. Production and prospecting scaled up slightly during periods of heightened strategic demand around the turn of the century and through the World War eras, but the limited size of the vein deposits eventually led to a total cessation of all organized mining activities by the mid-twentieth century.

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