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

加拿大是镍、铜、铂和钯的主要出口国，其中大部分来自铁镍铜硫化物矿床，用于制造不锈钢、可充电电池和其他高科技应用。这些矿床大多埋藏在覆盖层或其他岩石下，发现这些矿床既困难又昂贵，需要了解它们是如何形成的，它们是在哪种地质环境中形成的，以及如何在大量不含经济矿化的类似岩石中识别经济矿化的“足迹”。该项目解决了我们需要更好地了解的两个方面：形成这些矿床的熔融岩石是如何熔化并结合下伏岩石的，这一过程似乎对形成许多此类矿床至关重要，以及铁镍铜硫化物熔体是如何结晶并被划分为缺铜铂的上部和富铜铂的下部。两者都是了解矿床如何形成的关键，也是矿床“足迹”的关键部分。

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".