Geology, Geochemistry, and Petrogenesis of Magmatic Ni-Cu-(PGE) Deposits

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Canada is a major exporter of nickel, copper, platinum, and palladium, most of which comes from iron-nickel-copper sulfide deposits and is used to make stainless steels, rechargable batteries, and other high-tech applications. Discovering these deposits, most of which are buried under overburden or other rocks, is difficult and expensive, requiring an understanding of how they formed, in which geological environments they formed, and how to recognize the "footprint" of an economic mineralization amongst the plethora of similar rocks that do not contain economic mineralization. This project addresses two aspects that we need to understand much better: how the molten rocks from which these deposits formed melted and incorporated underlying rocks, a process that appears to be critical to forming many deposits of this type, and how iron-nickel-copper sulfide melts crystallize and become zoned into copper-platinum-poor upper parts and copper-platinum-rich lower parts. Both are critical in understanding how the deposits formed and are critical parts of the ore deposit 'footprint".