Chabazite

specimen number:
9302297

location:
Disko Island, Qeqertalik, Greenland

description:
Neat locality example for the species, this one from the late 19th century. Colorless crystals of chabazite to 0.5 cm in size scattered richly over matrix. The specimen comes with an antique label as shown at the end of the video.

The Disko Island locality, situated off the western coast of Greenland, is a unique geological area globally recognized for its occurrences of terrestrial native iron and zeolites. Geologically, the island is dominated by thick sequences of Tertiary-aged flood basalts belonging to the West Greenland Basalt Province, which formed during the opening of the Labrador Sea. As the hot basaltic magma ascended through the crust, it erupted through and reacted with thick, organic-rich sedimentary beds containing coal and shale, initiating a natural chemical reduction process that transformed iron oxides in the magma into metallic native iron blocks and grains hosted within the basalt. Commercial exploration and historical quarrying began in 1870 after explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold discovered massive native iron boulders at Uifak, mistakenly believing them to be meteorites. While the island never hosted large-scale corporate base-metal mines due to the extreme Arctic climate and remote location, localized surface extraction, academic expeditions, and specimen salvage operations took place intermittently through the twentieth century, with targeted geological field collection continuing into the early twenty-first century.

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