Crocoite from Tasmania, Australia is one of our Top 100 Minerals.
Despite their delicate nature, the brilliant red prisms of crocoite have been sought by mineral collectors since late in the nineteenth century. The first specimens of crocoite were found in Russia's Ural Mountains, near Beresov, and named after its vibrant color, using the Greek krokos, meaning saffron. Specimens from this locality are scant, from other localities even fewer, except Tasmania. The mines around the old townsite of Dundas are the only place in the world where these long, slender crystals of crocoite have been found in abundance. Crocoite is a rare lead chromate, but in Tasmania, it was mined in massive quantities as a flux for smelters in nearby Zeehan. Some of the crystals extracted were reportedly so large they had to be broken into sections to be lifted by the miners.
Thousands of fine crystals and groups have been mined. Silver-lead mining in the area ceased in the first half of the twentieth century. Several mines were reopened for specimen mining in the 1970s and 1980s, but all the mines around the district of Dundas are now closed, caved-in, worked out or flooded, though rumor has it that a new specimen recovery operation is planned in a few of the mines.
