Metal Earth Symposium at GAC-MAC 2019

Fri

24 May 2019

Metal Earth results were front and centre at the Geological Association of Canada meeting (May 13-15) in Quebec City.

The symposium was entitled “Greenstone belt architecture and metal endowment of the Superior Province”, organized by Phil Thurston, John Ayer, Harold Gibson, Bruno Lafrance and Ross Sherlock. The talks were centered upon identifying the differences in belt architecture as a function of metal endowment. Metal Earth presented 21 talks and 3 posters.

There were three keynote talks:

1) Richard Smith and coauthors presented an overview of geophysical results

2) Mostafa Naghizadeh and coauthors presented an overview of the recently acquired reflection seismic and magnetotelluric results

3) Mike Hamilton presented an uptodate summary of U-Pb zircon geochronology from several transects.

The seismic results showed excellent pictures of the various transects and the magnetotellurics for the first time illustrated differences in conductivity down to mid-crustal depths along major trans-crustal gold mineralized structures. Amongst other interesting talks with large scale implications was that of David Mole and co-authors on a Lu-Hf zircon study of the Abitibi belt which showed some preliminary indications that the overall isotopic structure consists of N-S trending isotopic domains. Meg Stewart and co-authors showed the first view of an assemblage map of the Lau basin in the Pacific which will be useful in examining volcanic volumes in the Archean and any relationship to Phanerozoic oceanic analogues. A paper by Strongman and others may demonstrate a 2.7 Ga assemblage analogous of modern arcs in having abundant plagioclase-phyric andesites. There were many talks which demonstrated relationships at a trensect scale particularly for the Abitibi greenstone belt.

The symposium was well attended, and the implications will aid in sorting through Metal Earth’s task of discerning the differences in metal endowment between the Abitibi greenstone belt and the western part of the Superior Province.