New Mexico Mineral Symposium — Abstracts

New Mexico is well known for its deposits of uranium and long famous for uranium minerals. Perhaps one of the earliest documented discoveries of uranium minerals west of the Mississippi was by Jones (1904), from the Lemitar Mountains district north of San Lorenzo Canyon in Socorro County (Eveleth et al., 2009). This was long before the famous 1950 discovery of Haystack Mountain by Paddy Martinez, near Grants, when the uranium boom was in full swing and New Mexico assumed its mantle as one of the top producers of uranium in the United States. Approximately 240 uranium minerals have been described from world-wide occurrences (Back, 2014) but only 43 have been reported from New Mexico (Northrup, 1996; Mindat.org). Undoubtedly, many more species are present within deposits scattered about the state awaiting discovery.

Scientists have long noted that particular minerals are more common in certain types of deposits and ages of rocks. Synthesizing these observations with geochemical principles, Hazen et al., (2008) defined 10 stages of “mineral evolution” that have operated on the earth over the last 4.5 billion years. The geochemistry of uranium is highly sensitive to some of these “evolutionary stages” and the resulting mineralogy can be used to identify four phases of uranium minerals (Hazen et al., 2009).

Six of the first 10 stages of mineral evolution (Hazen et al., 2008) occurred prior to the formation of New Mexico ca 1.8 Ga (Karlstrom et al., 2004). Accordingly, two of the four uranium mineral evolution phases occurred prior to the formation of the oldest rocks in the state. Vestiges of the first two stages may be recognizable in some New Mexico deposits. This presentation will present the mineralogy of uranium within the context of the four phases uranium mineral evolution of Hazen et al. (2009) that is encoded in the rocks of New Mexico.

References:

1. Back, M.E., 2014, Fleischer’s Glossary of Mineral Species: Mineralogical Record, Tucson, 420p.
2. Eveleth, R.W., Chamberlin, R.M., and Lueth, V.W., 2009, Jerome Copper Prospects, San Lorenzo Canyon, Socorro County, New Mexico: New Mexico Geological Society, 60th Annual Field Conference Guidebook, p. 92–94.
3. Hazen, R.M., Ewing, R.C., and Sverjensky, D.A., 2009, Evolution of Uranium and Thorium minerals: American Mineralogist, v. 94, p. 1293–1311.
4. Hazen, R.M., Papineau, D., Bleeker, W., Downs, R.T., Ferry, J.M., McCoy, T.J., Sverjensky, D.A., and Yang, H., 2008, Mineral Evolution: American Mineralogist, v. 93, p. 1693–1720.
5. Jones, F.A., 1904, “New Mexico Mines and Minerals,” World’s Fair Edition, The New Mexican Printing Company, Santa Fe, 346 p.
6. Karlstrom, K.E., Amato, J.M., Williams, M.L., Heizler, M., Shaw, C., Read, A., and Bauer, P., 2004, The Geology of New Mexico, A Geologic History, in Mack, G.H. and Giles, K.A., eds., New Mexico Geological Society Special Publication 11, p.1–34.