Baratovite

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Baratovite is a very rare titanium-rich cyclosilicate mineral named after Tajik researcher Rauf Baratovich Baratov. It was discovered in 1974 at the Dara-Pioz glacier in Tajikistan and was officially recognized as a mineral in 1975. It’s considered the end member of a series related to aleksandrovite, and there is some debate about whether fluorine or hydroxyl dominates its chemistry—if it’s hydroxyl-dominant, some scientists say katayamalite would be the same species.

Baratovite has a monoclinic crystal structure and usually forms white, colorless, or pinkish plate-like crystals with a pearly to glassy luster. It cleaves perfectly on the base plane and has a conchoidal fracture, with a hardness of about 5–6 on the Mohs scale. It is a very light mineral (specific gravity around 2.9) and can fluoresce blue-white under short-wavelength ultraviolet light. It is also mildly radioactive.

Chemically, baratovite is made mainly of oxygen, silicon and calcium, with notable amounts of titanium, zirconium, potassium, fluorine and lithium. Impurities often include magnesium, sodium, iron and niobium. It occurs as an accessory mineral in veins of quartz, albite and aegirine-bearing rocks, especially at the Dara-Pioz massif, and it has also been found at Iwagi Islet in Japan. Associated minerals vary by locality, including quartz, albite, ekanite, titanite, aegirine and miserite at Dara-Pioz, and apatite, zircon, pectolite, sugilite, allanite, titanite, aegirine and albite at Iwagi.