Chlorargyrite

specimen number:
2273010

location:
Silver City, Grant Co., New Mexico, USA

description:
Wonderful old time specimen from New Mexico with rich crystallized chlorargyrite on matrix. The specimen is ex Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and comes with several old labels.

The Silver City mining district, located in Grant County within southwestern New Mexico, represents a historic mineral-producing region exploited through a dense concentration of both deep underground workings and sprawling open-pit quarries. Geologically, the area is positioned within a complex structural transition zone at the margin of the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range province, where Proterozoic basement rocks, Paleozoic limestones, and Cretaceous sandstones were heavily faulted, intruded by Laramide-age granodiorite porphyries, and capped by Tertiary volcanics. This intense igneous activity driven by deep hydrothermal circulation formed extensive replacement deposits, skarns, and supergene-enriched native silver and silver chloride veins in the carbonate strata, alongside massive porphyry copper-molybdenum mineralization at nearby deposits like Santa Rita and Tyrone. Historically, the discovery of chlorargyrite (horn silver) by prospectors at Chloride Flats in 1870 triggered an immediate silver rush, leading to the rapid incorporation of Silver City in 1878 and the establishment of major underground mines that drove the local economy. While the primary silver boom tapered off by the early twentieth century as the high-grade near-surface deposits were depleted, the district successfully transitioned into a massive base-metal hub dominated by large-scale, automated open-pit copper extraction at the neighboring Tyrone and Chino operations, which have maintained active commercial production, milling, and regional exploratory management under corporate owners like Freeport-McMoRan through 2026.

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