1.7" Yellow Cubic Fluorite Cluster w/ Purple Vertices - Okorusu Mine

The Okorusu Mine (Okarusu Mine) is located roughly 40 kmilometers (25 miles) north of Otjiwarango in Namibia, Africa. It is an open-pit fluorite mine that occurred as an alkaline igneous-carbonatite ring dike complex where the fluorite replaced pegmatitic carbonatite. Mining at this location started around 1920, only to be closed in 1963. Some additional mining took place after 1988 and much of the fluorite collected was provided to specific dealers for sale on the international market. The open pit mine officially closed in 2014, so the remaining material on the market is old stock. High quality specimens can be difficult to come across as a result of this closure.

The fluorite collected from this mine is famous for exceptional quality and color, ranging from purple to yellow-green and often containing sharp phantoms. These fluorites come from multiple "pits" in the mine, each of which produces their own unique fluorite specimens. Some of these pits contain a variety of rare earth element-bearing minerals, sometimes in significant amounts.

About Fluorite

Fluorite is a halide mineral comprised of calcium and fluorine, CaF2. The word fluorite is from the Latin fluo-, which means "to flow". In 1852 fluorite gave its name to the phenomenon known as fluorescence, or the property of fluorite to glow a different color depending upon the bandwidth of the ultraviolet light it is exposed to. Fluorite occurs commonly in cubic, octahedral, and dodecahedral crystals in many different colors. These colors range from colorless and completely transparent to yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, or black. Purples and greens tend to be the most common colors seen, and colorless, pink, and black are the rarest.