David R. Cooke,Jamie J. Wilkinson,Matthew J. Baker,Paul Agnew,CC Wilkinson,Harold Martin,Z. Chang,H Chen,JB Gemmell,SM Inglis,L Danyushevsky,Sarah Gilbert,Pete Hollings
Porphyry-related mineral districts can host many major ore deposits of diverse
styles and metal associations, including porphyry, epithermal and skarn deposits. In
these deposits, hydrothermal alteration is typically zoned, and alteration zoning has
long been an important tool used in their exploration (Fig. 1). However, the various
mineral assemblages and textures that characterize each alteration zone are also
present within barren hydrothermal systems, and in some cases may also be produced
by non-mineralizing processes such as regional metamorphism. Discriminating
mineralized and barren systems, being able to locate well-mineralized hydrothermal
centers, and recognizing the distal footprints of mineralization continue to be great
challenges to explorers. In this abstract, we demonstrate how the combination of
epidote and chlorite chemistry can be used to successfully detect the location of a
porphyry deposit, using the Resolution porphyry Cu-Mo deposit as a case study. The
results presented in this paper are derived from a blind site test submitted to AMIRA
International project P765A by Rio Tinto Exploration (RTX).