Description

Cleavelandite is a variety of the mineral albite, one of the constituent minerals of plagioclase feldspar, thus is found in areas where pegmatites and granites exists in certain localities around the world As with albite, cleavelandite also exhibits a triclinic crystal habit and has a hardness of 6- 7 on the Moh’s scale of hardness, it is usually found within cavities of other rocks or minerals. It was named in 1823 by Henry J. Brooke in honor of Parker Cleaveland, professor of geology and mineralogy at Bowdoin College in Maine.

Tourmaline is one of the most chemically complicated of all Silicate minerals. It is a complex Silicate of Aluminum and Boron and the composition varies widely with Sodium, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Lithium and many other elements that enter into it’s structure. It can occur in a long, slender needle-like crystal to a thick prismatic and columnar crystal to a radial like daisy formation. It comes in many colors usually black and brown (iron rich); brown and yellow (magnesium rich); and blue, red, green, yellow, and pink (lithium rich). This mineral is found in igneous rocks, like Granite Pegmatite, and metamorphic rocks such as Schist and Marble.