Navajoite mineral

Navajoite is a hydrated vanadium-iron oxide mineral with formula (V5+,Fe3+)10O24·12H2O in the September 2026 IMA list, which assigns grandfathered status G and original-description year 1954. That year is not a numbered IMA approval. The complete 1955 description characterized selected natural material from the Monument No. 2 mine, Apache County, Arizona, with residual impurities and uncertain partitioning of iron and reduced vanadium; its tentative V2O5·3H2O formula and indexing are historical interpretations. Evans and Hughes later reindexed powder/fiber diffraction from USNM 106900, whose type status they marked uncertain, using a C-centered cell with C2/m indexing. They attributed two extra lines to probable bokite and found that some other specimens labeled navajoite were bokite or mixtures. Their revised empirical formula was fitted to Sherwood's original 1955 chemical analysis, not a new independent assay, and the diffraction work did not solve the atomic structure. The earlier proposed natural oxidation of corvusite and storage-related water loss do not establish controlled transformation kinetics or a microbial mechanism. Navajoite is distinct from associated corvusite, bokite, elemental vanadium and mixed uranium-vanadium ore. These sources establish no isolated-product recovery or industrial deployment, and the mineral does not inherit vanadium's criticality designations.

Record source: data/records/navajoite.yaml