Paul Dennis edited geology3.tex  over 8 years ago

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Dirtlow Rake (SK148 818) is a major WSW-ENE trending strike slip fault lying just to the south of Castleton, Figure 1. The fault is exposed in a series of old surface workings where excavations up to 10 metres wide and several 10's of metres long have been made for the commercial extraction of galena and spahalerite, Figure 3. These old pits can be traced along the length of the fault for a distance of more than 10km. Where exposed individual slip planes show well developed sub-horizontal slickensides. In the fault zone and adjacent rock there is a pervasive mesoscale fracturing with variable fracture orientations and widths ranging from sub-mm through to several cms. The fault shows extensive development of a complex vein fill dominated by calcite with variable amounts of baryte, barite,  fluorite, galena and spahalerite. The calcite occurs as large (several cm long), elongate, syntaxial crystals. The growth form is often sparry with rhombohedral and scalenohedral terminations. In hand specimens and thin sections there is evidence of zoned crystal growth marked by colour variations, crystallographically controlled planes of separation and surfaces with high inclusion densities, Figure 4. Intimate intergrowth of galena, calcite, and barite suggests that the veins are equivalent to the zone 4 calcite of the mineral paragenesis described by Hollis and Walkden (2002).  The vein used for this study (DLR7) was collected from grid reference  SK14880 81805. It was not in-situ but adjacent to a similar vein growing syntaxially from the fault wall. Individual, optically continuous crystals of calcite are up to 10cm long x 1cm wide. They grow parallel to the c-axes.