- Write by:
-
Saturday, July 24, 2021 - 14:27:38
-
554 Visit
-
Print
Mining News Pro - Researchers at Curtin University received almost half a million dollars to develop a new method for extracting, identifying, preparing and dating individual crystals of rutile. The goal behind this process is to reveal details of their chemical make-up that could help guide geologists in searching for undiscovered ore deposits.
Rutile is highly resistant to chemical and physical breakdown, which means that its crystals can survive unchanged even when the rocks that once hosted them have been weathered away over time.
“We have established and fine-tuned sample processing protocols to extract rutile grains from rocks, unconsolidated sediments and polished thin sections, identify rutile from other TiO polymorphs using EBSD-SEM techniques and perform in-situ chemical and isotopic analyses on rutile using LA-ICP-MS and SHRIMP methods,” the technical report the scientists submitted to the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia reads.
“The in-situ analytical techniques include establishing glass and natural rutile standards to produce optimal geochemical data.”
In other words, the team analyzed a number of samples using mass spectrometry and found a clear chemical distinction between rutile associated with richly endowed gold ore systems and rutile from un-mineralized rocks.
That’s when the group noticed that the trace element ‘fingerprint’ of rutile formed in Kalgoorlie-Big Bell-type orogenic gold ore systems and may be unambiguously distinguished from the chemical signature of other gold systems and all other rutile-forming environments.
“Further, this chemical signature appears to survive regolith formation and later overprinting events, except for extreme metasomatism, and is preserved in detrital grains derived from weathering-erosion, transport, deposition and diagenesis. As such, use of detrital rutile in gold exploration may be comparable to diamond indicator minerals for diamond exploration, with similar transport scales from their source (i.e. >100 km),” the document states.
In the researchers’ view, this discovery highlights the potential exploration value of rutile in the ancient landscape of Western Australia and provides mineral exploration companies with a new way of quickly refining their search for undiscovered ore bodies.
“By using our new approach to analyzing rutile in the early stages of mineral exploration, geologists could quickly establish whether or not local rocks may have experienced a mineralizing event,” lead researcher Neal McNaughton said in a media statement.
According to McNaughton, although a similar distinct geochemical fingerprint has previously been reported for rutile from base metal deposits, those analyses did not clearly identify such a marker for the Western Australian deposits studied.
Short Link:
https://www.miningnews.ir/En/News/615100
Vista Gold has released an updated feasibility study for its Mt Todd gold project in Northern Territory, Australia, to ...
Gold production in Burkina Faso declined last year as deteriorating security conditions in the West African nation ...
Gold snapped nine days of record-breaking gains as underlying US inflation topped forecasts for a second month in ...
Alcoa will buy Alumina in an all-stock deal that values the Australian firm at $2.2 billion, and makes the US company ...
A Senegalese opposition coalition backed by popular firebrand Ousmane Sonko launched its presidential campaign platform ...
The ever-higher prices reached by gold are turning Dubai’s traditional bazaar into more of a window-shopping ...
Peru’s copper production should reach 3 million metric tons this year after hitting 2.76 million tons in 2023, energy ...
Recent tests of an AI system showed that it can detect how poorly regulated road development for mining, logging and ...
Australia’s Perseus Mining is not giving up on its plans to acquire African gold developer OreCorp, releasing on Friday ...
No comments have been posted yet ...