Tag: gold
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Fingerprinting Archean part 4, doing things
Introduction: other chill things to do with clustered deposits Last time we went through the process of trying to identify clusters of deposits with similar geochemical anomalies. We were kind of successful, in that there appears to some correspondence between some “type deposits” and the clusters. Well, now we’ve got these clusters, so what are…
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Fingerprinting Archean gold deposits using geochemistry, part 3: deposits
Introduction We’ve been talking about fingerprinting for the last two weeks (part 1 here, part 2 here), meaning taking some geochemistry data and using it to infer something about genetics of a deposit. Last time, we looked at what some of the correlations we can expect to find. In other words, the elements that might…
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Fingerprinting Archean gold deposits using geochemistry, part 2: correlations
Introduction Last week, we explored the idea of different ways of using geochemistry of other elements while exploring for Au. Geochemistry helps to: The key to all of that is to understand what elements associate with Au, and what do their relative concentrations and behaviors mean. We came up with a starting list of elements…
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Fingerprinting Archean gold deposits using geochemistry, part 1: introduction
Fingerprinting refers to the use of conventionally collected geochemistry data to enhance our ability to explore. We want to know the fingerprint of gold mineralization, so we can use other, better behaved elements as proxies for gold. We also want to understand the genesis of mineralization so we know how to vector in the deposit.…
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The fault valve model part 2: how to use it to find deposits
Last week, I wrote about the fault valve model and how useful it is for thinking about orogenic gold deposits. This time I want to try to put some of what we learned to good use and try to find some gold deposits. Reminder: 1) We are looking for zones of lithological and structural…
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The fault valve model, part 1: how to make a lode gold deposit
Introduction This week I made another video with Unicorn Exploration where we talked about Archean lode gold deposits, and a little bit about how they formed. I wanted to dive in to part of the story in a lot more detail.The idea of faults as valves and its importance to mineralizing systems was first described…
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What kind of mineral deposits produce the most gold?
Recently I started working on a series of videos with Maura Kolb (Unicorn Exploration) about different kinds of gold deposits (check out the video on her channel). Right away we wanted to talk about, OK, what is the breakdown between deposit type and gold production? I thought that would be pretty easy to search for,…