Mercuryville, California Mercuryville, California Mercuryville, California is a ghost town in the Mayacamas Mountains along The Geysers road. Mercuryville was founded in 1874, after cinnabar, a mercury bearing ore, was discovered in eastern Sonoma County around 1870. Mercury is a dense liquid metal that can be used to separate gold from other less dense materials and the California Gold Rush, which had begun only 20 years earlier, increased the demand and price of mercury to $1 a pound, making extracting the ore profitable, and prompting a short-lived mercury rush in the 1870s. When the price of ore dropped within a few years,
Broken Hill ore deposit hornblende schists. The ore consists of massive, recrystallised sphalerite-rich, galena-sphalerite and galena-rich sulfide lenses in folded horizons, known as No. 2 Lens Formation and No.3 Lens Formation. Both have distinctive metal ratios and gangue minerals. The ore boundaries are parallel to the bedding planes. According to Gustafson, "There is evidence that the ore has been introduced into an old, already folded, rock and has replaced certain favourable layers of that rock, particle by particle, with large tonnages of garnet, rhodonite, fluorite, marmatite (and wurtzite), galena, and other minerals that constitute the orebodies." The Potosi-Footwall Gneiss is found on both sides