Ivigtut Mine, Ivigtut stock, Arsuk Fjord, Sermersooq, Greenlandi

Regional Level Types
Ivigtut Mine	Mine (Flooded)
Ivigtut stock	Outcrop
Arsuk Fjord	Fjord
Sermersooq	Municipality
Greenland	Autonomous Territory

Ivittuut or Ivigtut is an abandoned mining town located on the coast of Arsuk fjord in southern Greenland. It was the centre of the Ivituut municipality from 1951 until 2008.

Ivigtut was the world's only mine for cryolite. Cryolite was used [as early as the nineteenth century] as a flux for processing bauxite in aluminium production and before that to produce opaline glass. The mine closed several times in the 1960s, 1970s & 1980s but production continued – dumps were dug out, the mine reopened to excavate low-grade ore and finally the pier, made from 'waste rock', was removed and processed.

Most of the interesting sulphides are known from small spots in polished ore sections (galena is a good indicator mineral!). In cryolite only pyrite, galena, sphalerite and chalcopyrite are common. Molybdenite chiefly occurs in the host rock, enclosing the cryolite orebody.

Ivigtut is a spectacular source of rare minerals, but optimistic, erroneous identifications abound. Cryolite crystals are for all practical purposes rarely available – they were collected a long time ago, and everybody wants them. Virtually all specimens came from two large pockets. By far most of the 'cryolite crystals' I see are thomsenolite, pachnolite, hydrokenoralstonite or something similar, subject to optimistic interpretation. Incidentally, thomsenolite does occur as parallel grown very large pseudo-cubic crystals and/or crystals with strong basal cleavage that make good cryolite imitations!

Particularly European dealers in the 1980s offered prosopite crystals, more often than not accompanied by assurances they had been 'x-rayed' and were thus correctly identified. Bogus! Most – most, but not all! — of these are microscopic crystals of hydrokenoralstonite, coating the interior of druses in massive blue prosopite. Obviously, if you remove the interior of a druse with a dental drill, and look for prosopite on your X-ray machine, you are going to find… prosopite! This comes from the matrix, not the crystals. Prosopite crystals are quite rare, invariably 'flattened six-sided' (say, like a double arrowhead), whereas hydrokenoralstonite is cubic (and in this association, usually octahedral).

Many uninformed people claim Ivigtut as the locality for their specimens, merely because it is the most famous locality there. Villiaumite… when I see this, I usually just walk away from the perpetrator. Villiaumite is sodium fluoride, comes from Greenland, and thus must be from Ivigtut 'where all the fluorides come from.' I doubt anybody would accept a claim of benitoite [should be from Gem Mine, San Benito Co., California] as coming from the Stewart Mine near Pala, San Diego Co. [lithium pegmatite with tourmaline] merely because both produce interesting silicates? In Greenland, villiaumite occurs exclusively at Kvanefjeld in the Ilimaussaq alkaline intrusion near Narssaq… a bit further than San Diego Co. is from San Benito Co.

(Comments by Claus Hedegaard, 8. 12. 2007)

More details on this locality in the caption of https://www.mindat.org/photo-1066061.html

Apparently owned by Eclipse Metals Ltd. since 2021, see https://www.eclipsemetals.com.au/projects/ivittuut-project/

Other Databases

Wikipedia:	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivittuut
Wikidata ID:	Q950978

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References