Albertite has a black colour, a resinous
luster, and a
hardness of 2½.[2] It is less soluble in
turpentine than the usual type of asphalt.[3] It was from a mixture of albertite and
pitch that
kerosene was first distilled in 1846 by
Abraham Gesner,[4] a
New Brunswick geologist who had heard stories of rocks that burned in the area and gave the material its first scientific study.
Origin
Albertite is formed from
oil shale in which some of the hydrocarbons have been remobilised as liquid
asphalt. The process is as follows:
Crude oil (petroleum) is produced from source rocks (in the case of
Albert Mines, oil shale).
The petroleum migrates through fractures and becomes trapped in the apex of an
anticline.
The lighter oils gradually leak out through the weakly permeable
caprock.
The bituminous residues (tars, asphaltanes, etc.) are left behind in the fractures as albertite.
Occurrence
Albertite is named after
Albert County in New Brunswick, Canada, where it was first found in the area that became known as
Albert Mines. There, the albertite occurs as discordant, cross-cutting
veins in the core of an anticline. It was initially mistaken for
coal. Most geologists of the 1800s were puzzled by how this "coal" came to be discordant to the local
strata, as they did not understand the nature of its
oil shalesource rock, or the fact that the albertite was essentially solidified
asphaltum.[citation needed]
Extraterrestrial albertite has also been detected on the dwarf planet
Ceres.[5]
^Martin, Gwen L. (2003). Gesner's Dream: The Trials and Triumphs of Early Mining in New Brunswick. Fredericton: Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum. p. 40.
ISBN1894475-46-1.
^De Sanctis, M. C.; Ammannito, E.; McSween, H. Y.; Raponi, A.; Marchi, S.; Capaccioni, F.; Capria, M. T.; Carrozzo, F. G.; Ciarniello, M.; Fonte, S.; Formisano, M.; Frigeri, A.; Giardino, M.; Longobardo, A.; Magni, G.; McFadden, L. A.; Palomba, E.; Pieters, C. M.; Tosi, F.; Zambon, F.; Raymond, C. A.; Russell, C. T. (2017). "Localized aliphatic organic material on the surface of Ceres". Science. 355 (6326): 719–722.
doi:
10.1126/science.aaj2305.
ISSN0036-8075.
PMID28209893.