Today, we’re going to take a closer look at one of my favorite stones, one we identified here last year among the class of turquoise pretenders and mimics: Chrysocolla.
It’s a stone that is closely related to turquoise, but is a separate mineral with its own identity. It often co-occurs with its more famous cousin, and shares similar blue and green colors and matrix patterns, but its chemical structure, while also similar, is nonetheless distinct. In written form, it is expressed as Cu,Al)2H2Si2O5(OH)4•n(H2O); unlike turquoise, it contains silicon.
There is also some controversy in mineralogical circles about whether chrysocolla is, indeed, an independent mineral at all, or whether it is simply a variant of yet another [non-turquoise] mineral known as spertiniite. Spertiniite is also a copper hydroxide mineral, one classified as “rare”; it was named for Francesco Spertini, who was the geologist at the Johns-Manville Mine in Québec, the place where it was first (in modern times, at least), “described” for the broader mineralogical community. It is found in similar environments around the planet, including copper mining districts in Arizona and Nevada; in Germany; in Kazakhstan; and in Namibia.
Those who subscribe to this theory believe that chrysocolla is merely a form of spertiniite combined with chalcedony (i.e., quartz). Since quartz is the world’s second-most-common mineral, it co-occurs with all sorts of gemstones, both turquoise and chrysocolla among them. But spertiniite’s chemical formula is expressed much more simply — as Cu(OH₂), for copper, hydrogen, and oxygen — and its manifests in less complex color patterns, as well. We subscribe to the theory that, as with a number of other minerals, such as variscite that are part of the same family of secondary copper oxides as turquoise, it and spertiniite are related, but are not the same mineral.
The photo at the top of this post is a specimen of chrysocolla rough that Wings found right here on the land; when he was young, they used to find nuggets like this in the broader area here relatively frequently. it shows the brilliant green and blue colors for which chrysocolla is known, but if you look at the same piece of rough from a different angle, and in bright sunlight, as shown below, you’ll see clearly the quartz crystals that formed in and with it:
The translucent bits of quartz are visible at either end, but are especially clear at the upper left. They are fully a part of the stone, and if he ever decides to cut and cab it, they will give it a beautiful translucent finish around the edges.
Once cabbed, it looks spectacularly beautiful, sometimes with a great deal of color but precious little matrix; other times with dark intense webbing that resembles the patterns common to turquoise. As I wrote of it here last year:
Chrysocolla is actually a beautiful stone. It often appears with webbed, blocky, or swirling matrices in a variety of colors and shades, some of them stunning. It tends to be more valuable in its own right than are many other stones that are mere mimics or impostors. Some chrysocolla looks very much like good Arizona turquoise from mines like Kingman or Sleeping Beauty, clear, hard, and robin’s-egg or sky blue with mysteriously wispy white inclusions, or sometimes with blended patches of green. Some of the most spectacular, however, has been given its own subsidiary name, Sonoran Sunrise.
The cabochon shown immediately above is a spectacularly beautiful specimen of the polished stone, one that, to my mind, exemplifies one its best qualities: a seeming ability to reflect that properties and appearance of Earth itself. It looks to me much like the world viewed from space, green land to the left amidst blue waters to the white, the dark rich soil that forms the mountains visible seemingly in topographical relief, with the translucent bits of white quartz aswirl over the whole like a veil of clouds in the lower atmosphere.
It’s far from the only way in which chrysocolla manifests, however. It appears in a wide variety of blues and greens with matrix patterns that range from minute and complex to nearly nonexistent. And there is one unique form that possesses an identity unto itself: Sonoran Sunrise.
Sonoran Sunrise is a specific form of chrysocolla that often resembles turquoise, because it appears in a classic opaque robin’s-egg blue shade, with a blocky, webbed, or swirled matrix. The matrix, however, is what makes its true identity clear, manifesting in shades of peach and charcoal black. Occasionally, a Sonoran Sunrise cabochon will have been cut in such a way that none of the peach color appears; the blue stone with the black matrix resembles turquoise more closely yet.
It is the colors that give rise to the stone’s name: streaks of night’s gray-black blended with the pale coral shades of dawn, parting to reveal the clear blue of the daylit sky in the Sonora regions of the Northern Mexico desert, all in one stone. Such cabochons tend to run in the range of $1 or so per carat, but because they are often available in substantial size, the stone’s final cost may be anywhere from $40 to $100. If you’re looking for a stone that has something of the appearance of turquoise, but it actually being turquoise is not a requirement for you, this is one to consider. It’s fabulous.
As of this writing, you can see beautifully cabbed examples of Sonoran Sunrise here and here.
But like turquoise, not all chrysocolla manifests in shades of blue. Some of it, like the turquoise variant faustite, pretty clearly contains zinc, giving it an electric lime-green hue. An example is shown immediately above, another case in which the quartz inclusions are obvious, seeming to swirl just above the stone’s colored surface.
Not all of chrysocolla’s greens are due to the presence of zinc, of course; like turquoise, a substantial proportion of it contains iron, which renders it a much softer, richer shade of emerald green:
The presence of iron also contributes to the dark brownish-black matrices in much of the stone. Once again, the translucent quartz is present in small amounts, but in this cabochon, the overall effect is one very like certain types of Royston turquoise, or the deep rich greens found in Manassa and some of the other Colorado mines.
Given its origins as a mineral that occurs secondarily to copper, it’s not surprising that it should appear in many of the same areas as some of the world’s best turquoise deposits. Outstanding chrysocolla specimens can be found in Arizona, in the same copper mining districts that have produced some of the state’s most famous (and valuable) forms of turquoise. Arizona’s Pinal County is said to be a spectacular source of chrysocolla in stalagmite form, with visible quartz inclusions.
It’s a gemstone that occurs worldwide, however: In South America, particularly Chile and Peru; in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Africa; in the mines of Eilat, Israel, which produce a form of it combined with copper itself that the country calls “Eilat Stone”; and in the form of azurite pseudomorphs in Western Australia.
For us, chrysocolla has no symbolic meaning beyond the artistic, and perhaps the cultural associations of the colors, with their similarities to turquoise. Non-Native “crystal practitioners,” however, do impute certain powers to it: Some consider it a stone of “feminine empowerment,” linking it to stereotypes of “gentleness”; some call it a “goddess” stone; still others connect it to “serenity” or to “teaching.” Some traffic in outright falsehoods, insisting that “American Indian people” used it for “calming energy,” which is of course has no basis in fact. As with virtually every other aspect of life, beware of any generalization about “American Indians” or “Native Americans,” and all the more so in contexts like these.
What’s interesting to me is that such practitioners seem, in this instance, to have ignored completely how the stone got its name, in favor of inventing whole new narratives. Very often, such theories will be directly traceable to a given stone’s popular name, or at least to its mineralogical and chemical composition, but that is not the case here. Because “chrysocolla” was a name first bestowed in ancient Greece, to refer specifically to . . . gold solder. It was said to be an alloy composed mostly of copper, combined with tin or lead and sometimes a small amount of gold to create a form of solder that is still used by goldsmiths even today. The name was reportedly coined in the year 315 B.C.E. by a scholar and philosopher named Theophrastus, who wrote treatises on many aspects of the natural world, including minerals and metals. Theophrastus was especially known and respected for his scholarly work involving the plant world, and the wiki entry about him speculates that it is this connection that caused the creator of a popular science-fiction television series to lend the scholar’s name to an especially green planet.
My guess is that this association is perhaps what informed the original choice, now apparently lost to time and memory, to name today’s featured gemstone after an ancient form of gold solder — the connection lying not in the substance itself, but in other work of the scholar who named it.
It fits.
To me, chrysocolla is very much a stone of the Earth as proper noun, a topographical map of Turtle Island and the world beyond: green grass and blue waters and rich brown soil and swirling white cloud cover. it’s why, on this particular day, I chose to highlight a jewel in my favorite hues, one that allows me to grasp and hold the power and beauty and spirit of our Mother in the palm of my hand.
It may not be a goddess stone, but it’s certainly a piece of Mother Earth herself.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
