Quartz

specimen number:
2282017

location:
Stanley Butte, Graham Co., Arizona

description:
A grouping of loose colorless tessin habit quartz crystals. In good condition.

The Stanley Butte area, situated within the Santa Teresa Mountains of Graham County, Arizona, is a historic mining and collecting locality noted for its distinct contact metamorphic and skarn mineralization. Geologically, the deposit formed where Tertiary granitic stocks intruded Paleozoic limestone sequences, creating localized skarn zones rich in calc-silicate minerals such as garnet and diopside. The locality gained prominence primarily for producing sharp, well-formed andradite garnet crystals, often occurring alongside quartz and minor copper-lead-zinc sulfide mineralizations. Small-scale mining and prospecting for copper and silver began around the late 1890s and continued intermittently through the 1910s and 1920s under various local claims. While economic ore extraction was limited and sporadic, the site became widely visited by mineral collectors for high-quality display specimens throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century.

The Tessin habit refers to a specific crystal growth form in quartz where the crystal tapers markedly toward the termination due to the rhythmic alternation of multiple steep rhombohedral faces. Geologically, this specialized habit develops in high-temperature, hydrothermal Alpine-type fissures or pockets where crystal growth occurs rapidly under fluctuating silica supersaturation and tectonic pressure conditions. The resulting crystals display a distinctive spindle or candle-like shape, with the horizontal prism faces becoming progressively shorter or disappearing entirely near the tip. This habit is named after the Canton of Ticino (Tessin) in Switzerland, where classic examples were first documented, though the growth mechanism has since been recognized in pocket-grown quartz specimens from highly localized metamorphic terrains globally.

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