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 Post subject: New Tanzanian find of...something.
PostPosted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 11:06 am 
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So, I stumbled on this article about new finds of rare earth-bearing deposits in Tanzania. I was interested, so I checked MinDat to see if there's any info on potential gems that are normally associated with this particular mineral. (As far as I can see, nope.)

Your thoughts? Could mining rare earths get us some new rough as well, or is that just not how it works?

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 Post subject: Re: New Tanzanian find of...something.
PostPosted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 2:31 pm 
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they say they found bastnaesite, which is a rare and beautiful rare-earth mineral (either Cerium, Lanthanum or Yttrium)
Image

possibly, they will find well expressed crystals that will be interesting to mineral collectors, and maybe some could be gem grade. However, note that if the crystal is undammaged and has a neat crystal shape, then it is likely way more valuable as is than cut.

rarely cut as a collector gem:
Image

it is often found inassociation with allanite, cerianite, synchysite, parisite, cerite, fluocerite, fluorite.

If you like yellow to orange rare earth minerals, also have a look to parisite and synchisite


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 Post subject: Re: New Tanzanian find of...something.
PostPosted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 11:57 am 
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Eudialyte is a collector stone that's quite sexy, and some of the best is Canadian, to boot, but the bulk of the rare earths have issues with extreme ugliness, opacity, fragility, and radioactivity.

However, REE's do come from pegmatites, and many wonderful minerals are found in pegmatites... bad news being that the majority of peg REE showings are just too sparse to be economic, and the places that do host megatonnes of REEs are just weird and boring, mineralogically speaking.

And of course the demand for REE's has dropped as manufacturers have found alternatives to cope with rising prices and Chinese monopoly of supply.


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