Karonie Gold Mine, Aldiss-Karonie, Mount Monger Goldfield, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australiai

Regional Level Types
Karonie Gold Mine	Mine
Aldiss-Karonie	- not defined -
Mount Monger Goldfield	Ore Field
Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire	Shire
Western Australia	State
Australia	Country

The Karonie mine is the largest mine in this goldfield, and lies on Cowarna Downs Station, approximately 120 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie, and 5 kilometres south of the Trans Australian Railway Line. It was mined by Freeport in the late 1980's, extracting 1.4 Mt of ore at 4 g/t yielding 175 000 ounces of gold. Several mining and exploration companies have explored the area since, including ReLODE Limited, Heron Resources, Moto Gold Mines, Regis Resources, Integra Mining and Silver Lake Resources, amongst others.

The mine is the type locality for honeaite, a rare gold thallium telluride mineral, found so far at only two locations worldwide. It is the first discovered thallium-bearing gold telluride.

It is named after the late Russell M. Honea (1929-2002), a consulting mineralogist at the Karonie mine in the late 1990's. He suspected a new mineral species from the samples, but did not have the time or specialised equipment to prove it. Through a mutual colleague in Colorado, the samples arrived at the Natural History Museum London.

John Still and Clive Rice from the museum studied the samples, but the crystal structures were too small to be extracted for structural analysis. Here they remained in storage until 2015, when they were re-examined, and a few larger crystal structures were identified, and studied by Mark Welch.

Honeaite is orthorhombic with a unique structure with no synthetic analogues. The authors state it consists of corrugated double sheets, each showing connected six member rings of TeAu3 polyhedra, of corner linked TeAu3 pyramids. Thallium atoms form rows in the grooves between the sheets, connecting adjacent corrugated sheets of the polyhedral. The structure is distinct and unique from other Au Ag tellurides, which are based on sheet structures with no connecting inter-sheet atoms.

The species is found with native gold, tellurobismuthite, petzite, hessite, calaverite, melonite, mattagamite, frohbergite, altaite, pyrrhotite, and molybdenite. It occurs in microvughs and microfractures, mainly within areas of prehnite alteration of amphibolite.

It is thought the species developed under greenschist-facies conditions, at lower temperatures than most of the other gold deposits in the Eastern Goldfields.

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References