Galena with Sphalerite
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Galena with Sphalerite from the Cadjebut Mine, Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia, Australia, measuring 76 × 50 × 45 mm and weighing 460 grams. A heavy piece, as Galena specimens always are, from a lead-zinc mine in the Kimberley.
Galena is lead sulfide, PbS, the main ore of lead, and it is instantly recognisable by its bright metallic lustre, cubic crystals and perfect cubic cleavage, along with its weight, with a specific gravity around 7.5. Sphalerite is zinc sulfide, ZnS, the main ore of zinc, and the two very often grow together. Cadjebut is a Mississippi Valley-type deposit, a kind of orebody formed when warm brines carrying lead and zinc moved through carbonate rocks and deposited sulfides in dolomite.
The host is the Lennard Shelf, a thick, dolomitised Devonian reef complex along the edge of the Canning Basin, part of a remarkable fossil reef system also exposed in the gorges of the Kimberley. Cadjebut was one of the Lennard Shelf mines worked in the late twentieth century and has since been closed and rehabilitated. Its specimens are now in fixed supply, and this Galena with Sphalerite from the David Vince Collection is one of them.