Malachite

specimen number:
2282064

location:
Apex Mine, Washington Co., Utah, USA

description:
Green crystallized malachite across the top of a breccia matrix with minor blue azurite. Nice locality example. In good condition.

The Apex mine, located on the eastern flank of the Beaver Dam Mountains in Washington County, Utah, is a historic underground operation widely recognized as the first mine in the world worked primarily for germanium and gallium. Geologically, the deposit consists of an irregular, branching, chimney-like body within a solution-collapse breccia zone hosted by the Pennsylvanian Callville Limestone along the steeply dipping Apex Fault. Intense supergene enrichment thoroughly oxidized the primary sulfide ore down to a depth of over 425 meters, concentrating germanium within goethite and hematite, and gallium within jarosite. First discovered in 1884, the mine operated intermittently for copper, lead, and silver until 1962, producing thousands of tons of base metals. The property gained renewed strategic significance when it was reopened from 1985 into the 1990s specifically to extract its high-grade electronic trace metals, after which large-scale commercial extraction ceased.

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