Leesite: Another New Species Discovered by Patrick Haynes

Leesite

Patrick Haynes

In 1989, Patrick Haynes collected what 27 years later would become the new uranyl oxide micromineral leesite. Its locality is the Jomac Mine in White Canyon, San Juan County, Utah. It is the locality, where at about the same time, Haynes discovered two similarly rare and microscopic uranium bearing species, blatonite and oswaldpeetersite. The name leesite is eponymous with Brian Lees, the legendary owner of Collector’s Edge.

Soon after collecting it, Haynes examined material under the microscope and assumed that it should be an identifiable species. The orange color led him to suspect it to be fourmarierite or curite. He submitted it to Dr. Michel Deliens at the Royal Belgian Department of Natural History in Brussels, Belgium along with other material, which the International Mineralogical Association (IMA) would later approve as blatonite and oswaldpeetersite. The verdict on the future leesite suggested that it was a combination of species.

Ten to fifteen years later, Haynes learned about success at identifying difficult new species by Dr. Frank Hawthorne, Professor of Mineralogy and Crystallography at the University of Manitoba. He sent a sample of the orange unknown material to Dr. Hawthorne to examine. Like the scientists in Brussels, Dr. Hawthorne believed it could be a mixture, but this time of a different combination of minerals.

Haynes explained:

Leesite is very fine-grained, and it is commonly associated with another orange potassium uranium oxide called compreignacite, which can make sample preparation very difficult. With the few "coarser" crystals one can generally make a visual determination, but that is unusual.

A few years later Pat became aware that Travis Olds and Tony Kampf had been “working up these ridiculously tiny minerals from Utah.” Around that time, Haynes encountered Dr. Peter Burns from University of Notre Dame, under whom Olds had studied when earning his PhD. He sent samples of the questionable material to Dr. Burns and PhD students to study. Dr. Olds, now a post-doctorate researcher at the University of Washington and his associates produced a successful and convincing analysis. Then Tony Kampf and several other mineralogists provided further input. The result was the submission of an abstract to the IMA for approval of a new species, to be named leesite. The approval came in 2016.

IMA rules stipulate that approval of a new species becomes official only after the authors of the abstract seeking that approval have published a synopsis. That happened in January, 2018, when the American Mineralogist published a synopsis of leesite by Olds, Kampf, et al. Patrick Haynes believes that only 130 samples of leesite are known to exist. All of them, were collected at the Jomac Mine, which was reclaimed in 1992, and leesite has been reported from no other locality on earth.