Epidote

specimen number:
2133281

location:
Hashupa, Shigar Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

description:
A grouping of beautiful gem epidote crystals. In great condition, an excellent thumbnail.

The Hashupa alpine cleft workings, situated high on the mountain slopes overlooking Hashupa village along the left margin of the Shigar River within the Shigar District of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, represent an internationally acclaimed mineral locality renowned for producing exceptional, razor-sharp crystals of dark olive-green to root-beer brown epidote that equal or surpass classic European Alpine standards in clarity and gemminess. Geologically, these deposits consist of specialized, low-temperature metamorphic fissures known as Alpine-type clefts, which cut directly through the Cretaceous-age volcanic and metasedimentary rocks of the Bauma-Harel formation within the complex Karakoram Metamorphic Complex. During regional tectonic deformation and low-grade greenschist-facies metamorphism associated with the ongoing collision of the Indian and Asian continental plates, pressurized hydrothermal fluids dissolved local calcium, iron, and aluminum ions from the surrounding chlorite-epidote schists and slowly reprecipitated them inside expanding rock fractures, allowing highly lustrous, elongated, and sometimes sword-shaped epidote prisms to crystallize cleanly alongside quartz, albite, titanite, clinochlore, and hair-like byssolite. Historically, while the broader Shigar Valley has been famed for pegmatitic gemstones for generations, the non-pegmatitic, high-altitude clefts near Hashupa were recognized and intensely exploited by indigenous families and specialized field collectors starting in the late twentieth century as international demand for high-end mineral specimens surged. Manual surface trenching and dangerous high-cliff pocket extraction have continued seasonally and sporadically through the early decades of the twenty-first century.

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