Home > African Minerals – March 29 > MS0670 Norrishite, Wesselsite, Sugilite

Norrishite, Wesselsite, Sugilite - Sold


Norrishite is a rare lithium manganese mica originally described from Australia (Eggleton and Ashley, 1989). A second occurrence with sugilite in South Africa permitted a restudy of its chemistry, and allowed dating of the deposits at Kuruman to 1010 million years old (Gnos et al. 2003). Giester and Rieck (1996) named wesselsite in honor of the Wessels mine, which the type and currently only reported locality. Wesselsite has an unusual but simple formula: SrCuSi4O10.

This norrishite forms a mass, 1.8 cm across, of brown cleavages to 2 mm. There are rich spots of blue wesselsite elsewhere in the matrix to 2.2 cm across, also with royal purple sugilite. This specimen is from the 2011 find, and was saved from jewelry fabricators in China by an American collector. Great piece. Rare stuff.