Ivigtut
I´d like to thank O.V.Petersen for informations taken from his articles and J.P.Frisch and R.Schoeler for specimens.
In 1906 the deposit was discovered, though specimens of cryolite had been know before (and described in 1802). Mining for cryolite began already in 1854 and lasted until 1987. By now the mine is closed.
The cryolite orebody (mostly cryolite, less siderite and sparse quartz, sulfides and fluorite) originally formed an irregular mass of 50x155x70 meters. Below that there was a siderite zone and in some areas a fluorite zone. All of the orebody was enclosed in a granite stock an 300 meters in diameter. So far the mechanism of formation is under discussion: the favorite version is that the cryolite is a pegmatitic or pneumatolytic formation in the granite. Adjactent to the orebody there is a pegmatite zone to the west.
You´ll be missing eudialyte here, but I decided to include Ivigtut in these pages, as not doing so would have meant to leave out St.Peter´s Dome and Gjerdingen.
Please keep in mind, that the multitude of sulfides can be seen under the (ore)microscope only.
Mineral list: (Bold = type locality)
Wolframite
Wulfenite
Zinnwaldite
Zircon
&Suggested reading:
Petersen,O.V., K.Secher: The minerals of Greenland, Mineralogical Record, 24(1993), 2, pp.29-36
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