Belloite is a halide mineral first discovered in the Rio Tinto Mine in Sierra Gorda, Antofagasta, Chile in 1998. Belloite has the ideal chemical formula of Cu(OH)Cl. The mineral has been approved by the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names, IMA, to be named belloite, after Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López, the founder of the Universidad de Chile. Samples of belloite are preserved in the collection of the Mineralogical Museum in Hamburg, Germany.
Belloite is a halide mineral first discovered in the Rio Tinto Mine in Sierra Gorda, Antofagasta, Chile in 1998. Belloite has the ideal chemical formula of Cu(OH)Cl. The mineral has been approved by the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names, IMA, to be named belloite, after Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López, the founder of the Universidad de Chile. Samples of belloite are preserved in the collection of the Mineralogical Museum in Hamburg, Germany.
== Occurrence == Belloite is commonly found alongside nitratine and paratacamite. It is unstable in the presence of water or in humid climates and will convert to botallackite and atacamite through the process of hydrolysis. Belloite is only stable in desert regions. It occurs in crystalline incrustations in its host rock. The most common host rocks for belloite are quartz, feldspar, or tourmaline. Belloite forms in tiny crystals, with an average size of 0.03 millimeters, at its largest reaching up to 0.1 millimeters in size.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).