1. Mineral Resources
  2. Online Spatial Data
  3. Mineral Resource Data System (MRDS)

Swede Creek

Prospect in Alaska, United States with commodity Mercury
Map
XML
JSON
KML
C
Sections on this page
  1. Identification information
  2. Geographic coordinates
  3. Site location context
  4. Geographic areas
  5. Commodities
  6. Materials information
  7. Alteration
  8. Nearby scientific data
  9. Economic information about the deposit and operations
  10. Mining district
  11. Links to other databases
  12. Bibliographic references
  13. General comments
  14. Reporter information

Geologic information

Identification information

Deposit ID 10001782
MRDS ID A012586
Record type Site
Current site name Swede Creek

Geographic coordinates

Geographic coordinates: -163.69825, 64.56543 (WGS84)
Relative position Swede Creek (Gulch) is a small, 0.4 mile long drainage that flows south to its mouth on Norton Sound, 1.7 miles east of Bluff. This locality is 400 feet east of the mouth of Swede Creek. It is part of locality 111 of Cobb (1972, MF 445; 1978, OF 78-181).

Site location context

Political divisions (FIPS codes)

Alaska(state)

United States(country)

North America(continent)

Land(continent)

USGS map quadrangles

Solomon C-4 SE(quadrangle 1:24,000 scale)

Solomon NE(quadrangle 1:100,000 scale)

Solomon C(quadrangle 1:250,000 scale)

Geographic areas

Country State
United States Alaska

Commodities

Commodity Importance
Mercury Primary

Materials information

Materials Type of material
Cinnabar Ore
Hematite Gangue

Alteration

  • (Local) Oxidation and possibly silicification as Malone (1962) reports this mercury deposit to be in quartzite.

Nearby scientific data

(1) -163.69825, 64.56543
ListMap

Economic information

Comments on the geologic information

  • Geologic Description = Cinnabar was reported in the placer gold deposits of Swede Creek in 1922 (Cathcart, 1922) and lode prospecting took place by 1929 (Smith, 1932). Two short adits and a shaft explore cinnabar-bearing lodes exposed in the seacliff 400 feet east of the mouth of Swede Creek (Anderson, 1944; Mulligan, 1971). Cinnabar occurs in two, thin iron-stained fault zones, 70 feet apart stratigraphically, that are subparallel to layering in marble and dip 10 to 15 degrees north. The cinnabar-bearing lenses are 5-10 inches thick and a few feet long in the upper fault; the longest dimension observed for an individual lode was 7 feet (Anderson, 1944). Samples of hematite-stained zones contained form 0.04 to 0.14 percent Hg; an 18-inch chip sample across a cinnabar-bearing lens contained 6.76 percent Hg; and a 7-foot chip sample across the same lens and adjacent lower grade mineralized rock contained 2.36 percent Hg (Anderson, 1947, p. 33). Mulligan (1971) sampled iron-stained zones here and did not detect mercury. Bedrock in the area is Paleozoic marble and a band of intercalated metsedimentary schist (Herried, 1965; Mulligan, 1971; Till and others, 1986).
  • Age = Unknown; Cretaceous or Tertiary (postdate mid-Cretaceous deformation and metamorphism in the region).

Economic information about the deposit and operations

Development status Prospect
Commodity type Metallic

Comments on exploration

  • Status = Inactive

Mining district

District name Council

Comments on the workings information

  • Workings / Exploration = The portals to the two adits are on the sea cliff about 30 or 40 feet below the top. The adits are short, one was 70 feet long and one 20 feet long (Malone, 1962). A 55-foot-deep vertical shaft is located about 50 feet inland from the sea cliff (Malone, 1962; Mulligan, 1971).

Reference information

Bibliographic references

Comments on the references

  • Primary Reference = Mulligan, 1971

General comments

Subject category Comment text
Deposit Model Name = Cinnabar in lenses along shallow-dipping fault in marble.

Reporter information

Type Date Name Affiliation Comment
Reporter 19-AUG-1999 Travis L. Hudson Applied Geology

Beyond USGS

Supplemental information added by qvyshift.com. Not part of the original USGS MRDS record.

Maps centered on this site

Authoritative Alaska resources

These are landing pages for further research — the state agencies don't currently expose per-mine deep links.