I had forgotten all about that! I still have some desert rose samples around here someplace. Also, a two foot sample of drill core, polished and drilled for use as a table lamp, a geode that looks like a human head. Strange, the stuff you pick up along the way.
We had students bring back sand crystals of gypsum from Desert Storm. They turned up when they dug earthworks. Did not notice any petroliferous material.
Hello Richard - growing up on Smelter Hill in Black Eagle in the 60s I found gypsum crystals weathering out of a red gumbo near the Big Stack. How would those have formed? (I went back there last year; everything had been bulldozed and capped because of the toxic chemicals from the plant, and the area was fenced off.)
Gypsum is just calcium sulfate, so the sulfur would have been easy to get in smelter products. There wasn't much calcite (or other calcium minerals) in the Butte ores, but they did add a lot of calcite (limestone) to the smelter material as flux, to make it flow and probably to reduce the melting temperature. So I would bet that it grew in the mud post-smelting, with accidental smelter output and waste in rainwater/excess smelter water as the components. Gypsum can grow quite quickly!
I had forgotten all about that! I still have some desert rose samples around here someplace. Also, a two foot sample of drill core, polished and drilled for use as a table lamp, a geode that looks like a human head. Strange, the stuff you pick up along the way.
We had students bring back sand crystals of gypsum from Desert Storm. They turned up when they dug earthworks. Did not notice any petroliferous material.
Hello Richard - growing up on Smelter Hill in Black Eagle in the 60s I found gypsum crystals weathering out of a red gumbo near the Big Stack. How would those have formed? (I went back there last year; everything had been bulldozed and capped because of the toxic chemicals from the plant, and the area was fenced off.)
Gypsum is just calcium sulfate, so the sulfur would have been easy to get in smelter products. There wasn't much calcite (or other calcium minerals) in the Butte ores, but they did add a lot of calcite (limestone) to the smelter material as flux, to make it flow and probably to reduce the melting temperature. So I would bet that it grew in the mud post-smelting, with accidental smelter output and waste in rainwater/excess smelter water as the components. Gypsum can grow quite quickly!