Here is something I posted about a month ago on ihub.I thought it could be good to read again. This is something that could be happening to Kat at Rusty Ridge.
STOKES here is something everyone here should read, including Gump, please read until the end of my post, it's all there:
You were certainly building up a good, effective team. What was still missing? What was missing was a structural geologist. Structure is very important in ore deposit formation, because it is all very well to have an ore-forming solution, but those solutions have to be channelled and moved through some sort of plumbing system into an environment where they can really form an ore deposit. Dr Tim O’Driscoll had done some quite famous work in Broken Hill before the Second World War, but especially after that war, and was, in my opinion, a most outstanding structural geologist. So Tim, who was working with me in Kalgoorlie and had done some wonderful work on the structural location of nickel deposits in Western Australia, was asked to move to Adelaide and join the team. Tim had demonstrated his ability to identify deep structures – I mean ‘deep’: the structures that could be fracturing the Earth down one, two, three, five, perhaps 10 kilometres or more. His PhD research work had shown that these structures can have very subtle expressions at the surface. Their expression at the surface may be anything but a simple, straight-line fault!
Anything but obvious, yes.
Obvious if you know what to look for and how to look, but not otherwise! That was the basis of Tim’s brilliance.
Geophysics-tectonics map of Stuart Shelf showing the very important west-north-west deep structures which Dr. Tim O’Driscoll identified and were the basis for locating the tectonic targets, ie. structural intersections which provide pathways for mineralising fluids.He did a lot of work on the structural setting of the copper deposit at Mt Gunson, which had been the focus of Hugh Rutter’s geophysical studies. He showed beyond all doubt that underneath the Mt Gunson copper deposit was a very distinct major, regional, west-north-west striking, deep-buried structure, intersected at Mt Gunson by a strong north-north-east structure. It was at a structural intersection, a good place for a good plumbing system! You didn’t have to be too brilliant, shall we say [laugh], in order to think, ‘If here’s a small copper deposit, a gravity anomaly, and a magnetic anomaly and a structural intersection, let’s go and look where Hugh Rutter has all these other magnetic and gravity anomalies and see if there are strong structures there as well.’
Tim identified a small number of what he called ‘tectonic targets’: structural targets, coincident with the magnetic and gravity features, which could be and maybe were due to the sort of basic lava rocks or igneous rocks that Douglas thought would be the best source rocks. The first target we drilled was very close to a cattle watering hole dug out by a pastoralist to catch rainwater to water his cattle. He had excavated that dam at the same time as the world Olympic Games were being held in Melbourne, so he called it the ‘Olympic Dam’. And so this project, the testing of this structural feature coincident with magnetics and gravity anomalies, was called the Olympic Dam target. (The small dam was the only feature in the desert to identify it!)
The first drill hole: RDI in a remote desert, 38m at 1% copper.As we drilled, beneath 300 metres of barren sediment the drill intersected a most astonishing rock full of iron oxide, hematitic, highly fractured – a breccia. Here was rock we’d never ever seen the likes of before. The interesting funny story is that Douglas said, ‘Hooray, here we are! We’ve got a fractured basic “source-rock” that’s been now leached of copper because it’s full of hematite. Let’s send it away for assay to show how much it’s been leached of copper.’ Douglas wanted to see a basic rock; he needed to see it, that is what he wanted to see and that is what he saw. But we couldn’t identify what this rock really was.Anyway, back came the assay. The rock wasn’t leached of copper, it contained 1% copper. Initially, we couldn’t see any copper sulphides as they were very fine-grained, but we went back to the core and, lo and behold, we found the copper mineral bornite – which is not easy to see in a hematite matrix, being almost the same colour.»
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