Western Australian hydrothermal and magmatic deposits that formed several hundred kilometres apart more than two and half billion years ago share more commonalities than previously thought.<\/p>\n
PhD student Matthew Demmer, from the ARC Training Centre in Critical Resources for the Future<\/a> at The University of Western Australia, is lead author of the study published in Nature Communications<\/a>, which revealed new links between mineral deposits that historically were thought to have formed through very different processes.<\/p>\n \u201cIn geology, we usually consider different deposit types as unrelated, but we took a different approach here and explored their commonalities instead as a way to learn how to explore for them more efficiently and sustainably,\u201d Mr Demmer said.<\/p>\n The study examined hydrothermal gold in the Kalgoorlie and Kurnalpi Terranes and magmatic palladium-platinum-nickel in the South-west Terrane of the Archean Yilgarn Craton of WA.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found that these deposits not only formed at the same time but also shared isotopic and metal signatures, as well as a connection to a hydrous mantle,\u201d Mr Demmer said.<\/p>\n The results suggest that the deposits shared their origin with a mantle that had been previously enriched in metals and volatiles, which moved through the Earth\u2019s crust to create ore.<\/p>\n \u201cOur findings challenge conventional views that treat this type of mineralised systems as unrelated,\u201d Mr Demmer said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe suggest that instead of using models that focus on understanding the formation of single deposits to help us find more mineral deposits, geologists should also adopt a \u2018bottom-up\u2019 approach. <\/p>\n \u201cUnderstanding what processes enrich the mantle and when these processes occur, might help us understand where to look on the surface and in geological time for new mineral deposits.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Western Australian hydrothermal and magmatic deposits that formed several hundred kilometres apart more than two and half billion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,247342,247343,308,247348,5284,58676,247345,247344,3088,6827,125088,121061,5287,5286,128,247346,247347],"class_list":["post-489415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-critical-minerlas","tag-deposits","tag-exploration","tag-geologists","tag-gold","tag-hydrothermal","tag-isotopic","tag-magmatic","tag-metal","tag-mining","tag-nickel","tag-ore","tag-palladium","tag-platinum","tag-science","tag-signatures","tag-volatiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}