The name is from the Greek for treacherous: miners took it for galena and got no lead. The structure is diamond’s with every other atom swapped for the other element, and the semiconductors gallium arsenide and indium phosphide take the same form.
Research Elements Compound · ZnS One unit cell, the smallest block that repeats in every direction to build the whole crystal. Atoms on its faces, edges and corners are shared with the neighboring cells. Farther atoms are drawn fainter. Atom positions from the Crystallography Open Database entry 9000107 (Skinner, B. J., 1961). The ore of zinc, nearly always together with galena, in hydrothermal veins and in beds of limestone where metal-rich brines came through: Red Dog in Alaska, the largest zinc mine in the world, Broken Hill in Australia, Rammelsberg in Germany and the Tri-State district around Joplin, Missouri. Pure crystals are honey-colored; iron in the lattice turns most of it black. Open pit at Red Dog and underground elsewhere. The ore is crushed and ground, and selective froth flotation lifts the sphalerite from the galena and the waste into a concentrate of about 50% zinc. The concentrate is roasted to zinc oxide, dissolved in sulfuric acid and plated out as zinc metal by electrolysis. Cadmium, germanium and indium come out of it as by-products. Half of all zinc goes to galvanizing steel.Sphalerite
Elements
Crystal structure
Cell: a = b = c = 5.4093 Å, all angles 90°
Space group: F -4 3 mWhere it's found
How it's mined
Notes