I have a 377 kb PDF of the article about the formation of the crystals in
Cave of the Crystals in the Naica mine. (Someone just posted a link to a
news item about it.) If you'd like a copy, e-mail me. I'll probably wait a
few days for all requests to come in so that I can send it out only once, to
multiple people in a single e-mail. I had not known that anhydrite can be
deposited directly from water that is hot enough. (I'd thought gypsum was
always the original form, and that anhydrite was metamorphosed gypsum, in a
manner of speaking.) The author thinks the large crystals were formed at a
temperature near the point where the solubilities of gypsum and anhydrite
are the same.
Incidentally, the scale on the map of the Cave of the Crystals in the
NSS News (February) is wrong. The map is the same one that appeared in
Speleologia 55, from Italy, and the editors of Speleologia messed up the map
when they prepared it for publication. I noticed, when working on an article
for the AMCS, that the scale was inconsistent with the room's dimensions
stated in the text and checked into it. For a map with the correct scale,
see the forthcoming (about June) AMCS Activities Newsletter 30.--Bill Mixon
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