Platinum (2.7g)

specimen number:
2262197

location:
Ural Mts., Russia

description:
A bright loose metallic platinum nugget. This weighs 2.7 g. The specimen comes with an antique label from Lawrence Conklin.

The Ural Mountains of Russia, specifically the complexes around Nizhny Tagil and the Is and Tura river basins, represent the world's premier historical locality for the discovery of massive platinum nuggets. Geologically, these native platinum deposits are classified as Uralian-type zoned mafic-ultramafic intrusive complexes, where primary platinum-group element mineralization formed deep within dunite and pyroxenite cores during the Paleozoic era. Over millennia, intensive weathering and erosion concentrated the heavy, chemically inert native platinum into extensive alluvial placer deposits, yielding rounded, steel-gray nuggets that often contained inclusions of chromite, iridiosmium, and isoferroplatinum. Historically, the discovery of platinum in the Urals occurred in 1824, prompting a massive mining rush that saw the Russian Empire dominate global platinum production throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Large-scale dredging, hand-panning, and open-cut quarrying operations peaked between 1890 and World War I, with active mining transitioning to heavily mechanized industrial dredging after the Russian Revolution. While primary platinum production has shifted largely to copper-nickel byproduct extraction in other regions, intermittent alluvial placer mining and specialized dredging operations continue along the Uralian river systems through 2026.

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