The History of Morenci Turquoise
Where does Morenci turquoise come from? Most of the high-grade Morenci turquoise came from a claim owned by William “Lucky” Brown. He called it the “Morenci Turquoise Mine” but really it was located on the property of the massive and still active today Morenci open pit copper mine in Greenlee county Arizona. In the late 1950’s William, while working for Phelps Dodge Mining Co (PD) at the Morenci open pit mine was able to successfully negotiated mining rights to the turquoise in certain areas of the land owned by PD. His claim and mining operation was active from 1956 – 1984.
Another source of Morenci turquoise during the 70’s and 80’s was “Lunch box” turquoise which was smuggled out by employees of the Phelps Dodge open pit copper mine. This action was prohibited but very rarely enforced as the mining company was mostly interested in copper and didn’t care if employees collected other specimens. Today the mine is owned by Freeport-McMoRan, and smuggling any material out of the mine is strictly prohibited and can result in termination.
Morenci is still a very active mine today while Freeport-McMoRan continues to mine copper ore. However the process for extracting copper from the copper ore has moved away from the environmentally negative process of smelting to solvent extraction and leeching. In this process the copper ore is crushed and then put out on fields where sulphuric acid is applied. This process unfortunately contaminates and / or destroys any turquoise in the copper ore thus making what little Morenci turquoise there is on the market even more valuable.
Characteristic of Morenci Turquoise
High grade and much sought-after Morenci turquoise has a brilliant sky blue color with variations of Kaolin (more grayish) material, quartz (whitish crystal) material, Hematite (blackish areas), Pyrite (fool’s gold) flecks mixed in with the hematite and pyrite areas in the mother rock or darker matrix.
Below are some examples of rough Morenci turquoise and some jewelry.
