4.3" Natural, Native Copper with Cuprite - Carissa Pit, Nevada

This is a natural formation of native copper with cuprite, mined from the Carissa Pit in the Battle Mountain Mining District of Nevada. It has a green and brown patina and has a section of removable matrix still naturally associated with the copper.

Native copper is an uncombined form of copper that occurs as a natural mineral. Copper is one of the few metallic elements to occur in native form, although it most commonly occurs in oxidized states and mixed with other elements. Native copper was an important ore of copper in historic times and was used by prehistoric peoples.

Native copper occurs rarely as isometric cubic and octahedral crystals, but more typically as irregular masses and fracture fillings. It has a reddish, orangish, and/or brownish color on fresh surfaces, but typically is weathered and coated with a green tarnish of copper carbonate.

The mines of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Upper Michigan were major copper producers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and are still the largest deposits of native copper in the world. Native Americans mined copper on a small scale at this and several other locations, and evidence exists of copper trading routes throughout North America among native peoples, proven by isotopic analysis. The first commercial mines in the Keweenaw Peninsula (which is nicknamed the "Copper Country" and "Copper Island") opened in the 1840s.
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DETAILS
SPECIES
Copper (Cu) & Cuprite
LOCATION
Carissa Pit, Battle Mountain Mining District, Lander County, Nevada
SIZE
4.3" wide
CATEGORY
ITEM
#168915