Copper's precious passengers — where platinum and palladium hide in a porphyry
- Noel Ong
- 12 minutes ago
- 20 min read
A handful of the world's giant copper mines also carry platinum and palladium. They are rarely worth mining on their own — but the story of how they got there is one of the clearest windows we have into how a copper-gold deposit is made. This is that story, told for the curious rather than the credentialled.
This Samso Insight is inspired by the International Symposium on Mafic-Ultramafic Mineral Systems. This is pretty much the culmination of Day 1 where the talks were focused on Magmatic Processes. For the general public, an academic conference such as this would put you to sleep. However, I find these talks are the ground work that allow me to gain a greater understanding of the facts and the processess that are used to drive the stories in the business part of the sector. The relevant talk that made me think on a commercial sense was by Jung-Woo Park on "Mechanism and conditions for PGE enrichment in porphyry deposits."
Samso Insights | Research Note | PGE and A Porphyry | Samso Geology Series |
1.00 — WHAT WE ARE ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT
Two metals, two completely different jobs - Copper and the PGEs - Platinum and Palladium
Porphyry deposits are the giants of the copper world — they supply roughly three-quarters of mined copper and a large slice of gold and molybdenum. The platinum-group elements (PGE) are a family of six rare, precious metals (Figure 1). Normally we get them from a totally different kind of rock (layered intrusions like South Africa's Bushveld). So finding platinum and palladium inside a copper porphyry is a genuine curiosity and it turns out to be useful in two very different ways.
Figure 1: The six PGE behave as two groups. The "iridium-group" (IPGE: Os, Ir, Ru) stays locked in the deep mantle; the "palladium-group" (PPGE: Pt, Pd, Rh) is mobile enough to travel — and in porphyries it is almost entirely palladium, with subordinate platinum. Source: original Samso illustration of concepts in Park et al. (2021), Nature Reviews Earth & Environment; PGE grouping after Barnes et al. and Economou-Eliopoulos (2005).
Almost everything that follows is really a story about palladium and the rare conditions that let it survive the long journey from the mantle to a copper mine near the surface.
2.00 — THE CONVEYOR BELT
How a porphyry gets built in the first place
Before we can talk about the passengers, we need the vehicle. A very novel and simplistic way to describe a porphyry copper deposit is to imagine the end of a long magmatic conveyor belt that starts where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, what we geologists call a subduction zone (Figure 2). The next step is to imagine water that is in the system being squeezed off the sinking slab, triggering melting in the mantle above it, producing magma that is unusually wet, sulfur-rich and oxidized. That recipe is the whole ballgame.
Figure 2: Optimum conditions for development of giant porphyry copper deposits. From Sillitoe and Perello (2005, their Figure 15). (source: USGS Porphyry Copper Deposit Model — John, D.A. et al. (2010), SIR 2010-5070-B.)
The metals, copper, gold, molybdenum, and our passengers, are carried up dissolved in the magma and then handed off to that escaping fluid. The fluid cooks the surrounding rock into the tell-tale "potassic" alteration and drops its metal load as veins and disseminated grains. So far, so ordinary. The question that decides everything is: did the metals survive the trip, or get dumped on the way?
3.00 — THE TWO DIALS
Every deposit comes down to size and grade
Economists and geologists watch two numbers. Size, how much ore is set mostly by how big and how long-lived the magma system was, and how much water it carried. Grade is related to how rich that ore is and that is set by how much metal the magma started with and how efficiently it delivered it. For the platinum-group elements, one process dominates the grade dial above all others and that is the timing of sulfide saturation. Everything in the next three sections is an unpacking of that single phrase.
The one idea to keep
Copper, gold and palladium are all "chalcophile", meaning that they love sulfur. Given the chance, they abandon the magma and dive into any droplet of molten sulfide that forms. Whether that is good news or a disaster depends entirely on when those droplets appear.
4.00 — THE FORK IN THE ROAD
The sulfide trap: early death or late delivery
Lets try and go through the geology as simple as possible. As magma rises and cools, sooner or later it becomes saturated in sulfide (Figure 3). The theory is that tiny immiscible droplets of molten metal-sulfide separate out, like oil beading out of water. Those droplets are dense, and they greedily absorb copper, gold and palladium. The fate of the whole deposit hangs on whether this happens early and deep or late and shallow.
Figure 3: The sulfide fork — the single most important idea in the whole subject. Sulfide droplets are where chalcophile metals go to hide. Form them too early and deep, and the copper, gold and palladium are buried before they can rise. Hold them off until the magma is shallow, and the metals survive to make ore. Source: original Samso illustration of the sulfide-saturation control central to Park et al. (2021) and Park et al. (2019), Mineralium Deposita 54.
This is also why palladium is such a sharp signal. Copper is abundant and somewhat forgiving; palladium is hyper-sensitive to sulfide. If a magma ever dropped a sulfide droplet, the palladium is the first thing to vanish. So a magma that still carries palladium is, almost by definition, a magma that kept its metals intact.
So what does this mean for explorers?
It turns the timing of an invisible, long-vanished event into something you can actually measure. Because palladium is wiped out the instant sulfide forms, a handful of cheap whole-rock assays on the right igneous rocks can tell an explorer which side of the fork a magma took, long before any expensive drilling.
A suite that still carries palladium, sits on the oxidised side, and shows the chemical fingerprints of shallow, late sulfide saturation (the trace-element ratios geologists lean on, such as Sr/Y and La/Yb) is a suite that kept its metal budget.
A suite stripped of palladium probably dumped its copper and gold at depth, and no amount of drilling will conjure them back. In practical terms, this is a fertility filter: a way to rank intrusions and prospects and concentrate effort on the magmas that were actually capable of building a deposit, rather than the ones that merely look the part.
It is a vector, not a guarantee, remember that you still need size, structure and a well-focused fluid system to make an orebody. Could this be one of the few tools that screens out barren ground early and inexpensively.
And what does it mean to the average ASX investor?
Mostly, it tells you how to read a company's announcements. First, treat "PGE in a porphyry" with calm rather than excitement: as the rest of this Insight shows, the contained palladium and platinum are almost always modest, so a headline framing PGE as a standalone value driver in a copper-gold project deserves a healthy dose of skepticism.
The real signal is the opposite and quieter as when the technical work points to an oxidised, often alkalic magma, evidence of late sulfide saturation, favourable chalcophile-element or Pd/Pt chemistry, and high Sr/Y, that is a company showing genuine evidence its system was fertile.
Read palladium as the tell, not the treasure. It is a clue about whether the copper-gold story underneath is real, not a metal you should be valuing the company on. None of this is a substitute for the usual homework such as grade, tonnage, depth, jurisdiction, balance sheet and management all still decide outcomes.
This is not financial advice, it is simply a lens for telling a magma that meant business from one that didn't.
5.00 — THE SWITCH
Oxygen decides when the trap springs
So what holds the sulfide trap off? The biggest lever is oxidation and that is how much free oxygen the magma effectively carries (geologists measure it as "oxygen fugacity"). The trick is what oxygen does to sulfur. In a reduced magma, sulfur exists as sulfide and saturates quickly. Oxidize the magma and the sulfur flips to sulfate, which the melt can dissolve far more of, so it takes much more sulfur before any sulfide droplet appears at all.
Figure 4: The oxidation switch. As a magma becomes more oxidised, the amount of sulfur it can dissolve before saturating in sulfide climbs steeply — roughly doubling across the sulfide-to-sulfate transition. A more oxidised magma can hold its sulfur (and its metals) far longer. Arc magmas are naturally oxidised, which is the deep reason they make copper deposits and most other magmas do not. Source: original Samso illustration of the S-content-at-sulfide-saturation vs oxygen-fugacity relationship of Jugo (2009), Geology 37; as applied in Park et al. (2021). Values indicative.
That single fact ties the room together. Oxidation lets a magma carry more sulfur and metal; it delays the sulfide trap; and it keeps palladium in play. It is also why the most fertile porphyry magmas are described as "hydrous and oxidized" — water and oxygen are doing related jobs.
6.00 — THE TECTONIC LEVER
Thick crust vs thin crust — and why it changes the metal mix
Park and colleagues' central contribution is to link all of this to something you can read off a map: how thick the crust is. Thick crust and thin crust send magma on different journeys, and those journeys produce different ore.
Figure 5: Two tectonic settings, two recipes. Thick crust holds magma deep for a long time and tends to build supergiant — but often gold-poorer — copper systems. Thin crust lets magma differentiate shallow with late sulfide saturation, keeping gold and palladium in play; this is where the precious-metal-rich porphyries cluster. (Real deposits sit on a spectrum between these end-members.) Source: original Samso illustration of the thick-vs-thin-arc model in Park et al. (2021), Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, key points and Fig. 6.
Geologists read crustal thickness indirectly, from the chemistry of the rocks themselves — ratios like Sr/Y and La/Yb rise as crust thickens, because deep, high-pressure crystallisation leaves a fingerprint. So a rock chemistry lab can effectively tell you which journey the magma took, long after the mountains have eroded away.
7.00 — THE FINGERPRINT
Using palladium to read a magma's history
Now the two threads meet. Because palladium is wiped out the instant sulfide forms, its abundance in a suite of rocks is a direct readout of whether sulfide saturated early or late — which is to say, whether the magma was fertile. This is the heart of why Jung-Woo Park's group cares about PGE in porphyries: not (mainly) as a metal to sell, but as a cheap, sensitive fertility tracer that separates ore-forming magmas from barren ones.
Figure 6: Palladium as a fertility ladder. Across barren, copper, and copper-gold systems, the surviving palladium climbs — because higher palladium means sulfide saturated later and the metal budget was preserved. A relatively quick PGE assay can therefore flag whether a magmatic suite was capable of building an ore deposit. Source: original Samso schematic of the chalcophile-fertility relationship in Park et al. (2019), Mineralium Deposita 54; Cocker et al. (2015), J. Petrol. 56 (El Abra). Schematic, not to scale.
Not just theory — tested against real deposits
That's the idea. The proof is that it has been tested directly against real, drilled, economically proven porphyries and it held up well enough to explain not just whether a deposit formed, but what kind of deposit it became.
The flagship case is El Abra, in northern Chile, which forms the basis of the study in this section. Cocker, Valente, Park, and Campbell (2015) conducted the first thorough PGE analysis of a felsic magmatic suite associated with an economic porphyry to determine the onset of sulfide saturation.
As they explain, PGEs exhibit extreme partitioning between sulfide-melt and silicate-melt, making them highly sensitive indicators of this timing. Their findings indicate that sulfide saturation occurred shortly before the exsolution of the ore fluid, with only a small amount of sulfide forming. This was sufficient to extract most of the gold from the magma but left most of the copper, as gold partitions into sulfide approximately 5–10 times more strongly than copper.
They conclude that this timing is the reason El Abra is a copper-only deposit rather than a copper-gold one. The method provided more than just a "fertile or not" assessment; it offered a detailed reading of the magma's history to explain the ore type.
Northparkes, in New South Wales, is the comparison that proves the point. A Macquarie Arc copper-gold system, it was chosen deliberately to test El Abra's logic against a different outcome. According to Hao, Campbell and colleagues (2017), the prediction was that Northparkes' magmas reached sulfide saturation later than El Abra's, so less gold would have been sequestered at depth — and the PGE data bore that out, consistent with Northparkes being a copper-gold deposit rather than copper-only. Two real deposits, the same tool, correctly discriminated by their palladium and PGE fertility signatures.
Zoomed out, the broader claim — that this method "separates ore-forming magmas from barren ones" — has its own dedicated test. According to Park and colleagues (2019), across many suites palladium, used as a chalcophile-fertility indicator, tracks with porphyry ore type: barren, copper, or copper-gold. That is precisely the three-way separation this section has been describing, now validated well beyond a single deposit.
A fair caveat
El Abra and Northparkes are themselves known, economic deposits, so these are retrospective demonstrations — the PGE signature correctly reads the fertility, and even the copper-only versus copper-gold distinction, of magmas we already know made ore. Using it prospectively, to screen undrilled prospects before anyone knows the outcome, is the direction Park's group and others argue for — not yet a long track record of discoveries made this way.
Why this is the real prize You will likely never mine a porphyry for its palladium. But palladium chemistry is one of the most honest answers to the hardest question in copper exploration: was this magma ever capable of making a deposit? A tracer that cheap and that sensitive is worth more to an explorer than a few tonnes of by-product metal. |
8.00 — WHERE IT ACTUALLY SITS
What the palladium looks like in the rock
When palladium does make it into the ore, where does it end up? Two recurring habits show up across the world's PGE-bearing porphyries — and both confirm that the palladium arrived early and hot, alongside the copper and gold, not as some late afterthought.
Skouries, Greece — palladium riding inside the copper
Skouries is a copper-gold porphyry in the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece (Figure 7.1), currently being developed by Eldorado Gold's Greek subsidiary, Hellas Gold, as an underground and open-pit mine. It's a small, steep, pencil-shaped intrusion — under 400 metres across at surface — but mineralised to a depth of nearly a kilometre, and it happens to be one of the most PGE-enriched porphyries known anywhere in the world.
Figure 7.1: Skouries is a copper-gold porphyry in the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece.
According to Eliopoulos and Economou-Eliopoulos (1991) and later confirmed by Cardiff University researchers working directly on Skouries drill core, the palladium isn't spread evenly through the ore. It's concentrated in microscopic grains of a palladium-telluride mineral called merenskyite, and those grains sit inside or right at the edge of the copper sulfide minerals — chalcopyrite and bornite — that geologists mapped out in section 6. In practice, this means the palladium was deposited in the same hot, early mineralising pulse as the copper and gold, not added later by some separate, cooler event. The ore itself even carries the signature in its formal name: geologists now describe Skouries as a "Cu-Au (Pd, Pt, Te) porphyry" — platinum, palladium and tellurium written directly into the deposit's own classification.
New Afton, Canada — palladium riding inside the pyrite
New Afton, west of Kamloops in British Columbia (Figure 7.2), tells a related but distinct story. It's an alkalic copper-gold porphyry, and unlike Skouries it's not a project under construction — it's an active underground mine, currently owned and operated by New Gold, producing real copper and gold concentrate today.
Figure 7.2: The New Afton copper-gold porphyry mine. (Source: N1 43-101 TECHNICAL REPORT – NEW AFTON MINE BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA)
According to a pair of 2023 studies in Frontiers in Earth Science, the palladium and platinum at New Afton sit inside crystals of ordinary-looking pyrite — but those crystals are chemically zoned, like the rings in a tree trunk, recording the changing chemistry of the fluid as it cooled.
The cores of the pyrite grains, which crystallised first while the fluid was hottest, are enriched in cobalt and platinum; the outer rims, laid down later as the fluid cooled and evolved, are enriched in palladium, nickel, arsenic and selenium. One of the more striking numbers to come out of that work: the cobalt locked into some of these pyrite cores reaches concentrations higher than in any other ore-forming system yet reported, anywhere. That's not a claim about the amount of copper or gold at New Afton — it's a reminder that this "ordinary" pyrite is quietly recording an extraordinary hydrothermal history, one crystal layer at a time.
The metal that never shows up
A small but telling detail from both deposits: the "stay-behind" iridium-group metals — osmium, iridium and rhodium — are essentially absent. At Skouries, they sit below the detection limit of the instruments used to measure them. This isn't a gap in the data; it's the whole story of section 1 playing out in the assay results. Porphyry PGE is, in practice, an almost pure palladium-and-platinum story, heavily skewed toward palladium — commonly around ten parts palladium to every one part platinum. That lopsidedness isn't a local quirk of these two deposits. It's the inherited fingerprint of the oxidised, sulfide-shy magma the metals came from in the first place, carried faithfully all the way from the mantle wedge to the mineral grain a geologist eventually puts under a microscope.
Two deposits, one pattern
Skouries and New Afton sit on opposite sides of the world, in completely different tectonic settings, mined by different companies at different stages of development. Yet the palladium in both tells the identical story: it arrived early, alongside the copper and gold, riding inside whichever high-temperature mineral was crystallising at the time, a copper sulfide at Skouries, a pyrite crystal at New Afton, and the iridium-group metals that would mark a colder, deeper origin simply never showed up. Here are real deposits, checked against real drill core, confirming the same magmatic story (Figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3: Two homes for porphyry palladium. (A) At Skouries and Elatsite, palladium hides in microscopic telluride/bismuthide grains (the mineral merenskyite) tucked inside copper sulfides and magnetite — high-temperature minerals, meaning Pd, Au and Cu were laid down together. (B) In British Columbia's alkalic porphyries, Pd and Pt ride inside hydrothermal pyrite and magnetite that are chemically zoned core-to-rim (Co-Pt core → Pd-Ni-As-Se rim), recording a fluid cooling through the main ore stage. Source: original Samso illustration of observations in Eliopoulos & Economou-Eliopoulos (1991), Econ. Geol. 86; Tarkian & Stribrny (1999), Min. Pet. 65; and New Afton studies (e.g. Sykora et al., 2018; LeFort et al., 2011).
A small but telling detail: the "stay-behind" iridium-group metals (Os, Ir, Ru) are essentially absent from these ores — below detection. Porphyry PGE is a palladium-and-platinum story, heavily skewed to palladium (Pd:Pt commonly around 10:1). That lopsidedness is itself the inherited signature of the oxidised, sulfide-shy magma the metals came from.
9.00 — THE NUMBERS
How much is actually there — and where
Reality check on the by-product dream. In a typical porphyry, total PGE sits below 10 parts per billion — vanishingly small. Only a special subset, almost all of them alkalic, gold-rich, island-arc systems, carry enough palladium to matter. Even then, the contained tonnage is modest by platinum-mine standards.
Figure 8: The PGE-enriched porphyry "club" is small. Skouries — over 200 Mt of ore — holds an estimated 15 t of palladium and 3.5 t of platinum; Elatsite about 13 t Pd and 3 t Pt. Worth recovering as a credit, but a rounding error next to a dedicated PGE mine. The enriched deposits cluster in four regions: the British Columbia Cordillera, the Balkans, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Source: Economou-Eliopoulos (2005), MAC Short Course 35; Eliopoulos & Economou-Eliopoulos (1991), Econ. Geol. 86; Economou-Eliopoulos & Eliopoulos (2000), Ore Geol. Rev. 16. Figures approximate.
The pattern in that table is the whole point of Economou-Eliopoulos's work: the palladium-rich porphyries are the gold-rich, alkalic ones. Across a survey of dozens of porphyries, palladium turned up in most of them at trace levels, but the genuinely enriched cases were nearly all tied to high gold and an oxidised, alkaline magma — exactly the "late sulfide saturation, metals preserved" recipe from the earlier sections, seen from the mine end.
10.00 — THE FRONTIER
How the metals actually hitch the ride up
One puzzle remains. Sulfide droplets are dense and are expected to sink, not rise, so how do metals that briefly enter sulfide ever get back up to the shallow ore zone? The leading answer is wonderfully simple, and it comes in two parts. According to Mungall and colleagues (2015), whose laboratory experiments first demonstrated the mechanism, the heavy sulfide droplet hitches a ride on a buoyant gas bubble and is carried upward. And according to Park and colleagues (2015), who studied lavas from the Tonga rear-arc, exactly this pairing, sulfide droplets clinging to vapour bubbles, is preserved in nature, confirming the process is real and not just a laboratory curiosity.
Figure 9: The bubble lift. A dense sulfide droplet (heavy, would sink) sticks to a buoyant gas bubble; surface tension holds them together and the pair rises, ferrying copper, gold and palladium up to the shallow ore zone. First shown experimentally, it has since been found preserved in natural arc lavas. Source: original Samso illustration of the mechanism in Mungall et al. (2015), Nature Geoscience 8, 216–219; natural evidence in Park et al. (2015), J. Petrol. 56 (Tonga rear-arc lavas).
A second frontier idea is worth knowing. According to Holwell and colleagues (2019), in some post-subduction settings an earlier round of subduction enriches the mantle "lid" (the lithospheric mantle) with metals such as palladium and gold.
Later, when that region is stretched or peeled away, low-degree melting taps that enriched store and feeds palladium-rich, alkaline magmas, which, they argue, is a plausible reason so many palladium-bearing porphyries are alkalic. As the authors themselves frame it, this remains an active research proposal rather than settled fact, but it fits the global pattern neatly.
11.00 — SO WHAT
What to take away
Pull the threads together and the platinum-group story in porphyries resolves into one clean idea: palladium is the metal that only survives a perfect journey. It needs an oxidised, hydrous magma, a sulfide trap that springs late rather than early, and a clean handoff to the ore fluid. When all of that lines up, you get a gold-rich copper deposit that happens to carry a little palladium. When it doesn't, the palladium — and usually the deposit — never shows up.
Samso take Don't buy a porphyry story for its platinum-group elements — the contained tonnes are almost always modest, and PGE recovery is a by-product credit, not a thesis. The real value of this science is diagnostic. The same conditions that let a porphyry carry palladium — oxidised magma, late sulfide saturation, the right crustal setting — are the conditions that make a fertile copper-gold system in the first place. So when you see Pd/Pt assays, high Sr/Y, an oxidised alkalic suite, or talk of "chalcophile fertility" in the technical work, read them as what they are: a magma showing its receipts. The palladium is the tell, not the treasure. |
The honest caveat This Insight simplifies a research-grade subject so a non-specialist can follow the logic. The figures are original Samso illustrations of concepts and indicative values from the cited papers — not reproductions, and not a substitute for the primary literature. Specific numbers (grades, depths, tonnages) vary deposit-to-deposit and should always be checked against the original sources and each project's own disclosures. |
References & sources
This Insight is built on two anchor works — a major review of porphyry-forming magmatic processes (Park et al., 2021) and the foundational survey of PGE in porphyries (Economou-Eliopoulos, 2005) — supported by the primary studies below. It also draws on a 2024 conference talk by Jung-Woo Park on PGE in porphyry deposits. All figures are original Samso illustrations of concepts and data drawn from these sources.
Primary source (framework) — Park, J.-W., Campbell, I. H., Chiaradia, M., Hao, H. & Lee, C.-T. (2021). "Crustal magmatic controls on the formation of porphyry copper deposits." Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 2, 542–557. doi:10.1038/s43017-021-00182-8. (Crustal thickness, sulfide-saturation history, oxidation and chalcophile fertility; basis for Figs. 02, 04, 05.)
Primary source (PGE potential) — Economou-Eliopoulos, M. (2005). "Platinum-group element potential of porphyry deposits." In: Mungall, J. E. (ed.) Exploration for Platinum-Group Element Deposits, Mineralogical Association of Canada Short Course 35, 203–245. (PGE-enriched porphyry framework; Skouries & Elatsite tonnage estimates; basis for Figs. 01, 08.)
Eliopoulos, D. G. & Economou-Eliopoulos, M. (1991). "Platinum-group element and gold contents in the Skouries porphyry copper deposit, Chalkidiki Peninsula, northern Greece." Economic Geology 86, 740–749. (Skouries averages ~180 ppb Pd, ~26 ppb Pt.)
Economou-Eliopoulos, M. & Eliopoulos, D. (2000). "Palladium, platinum and gold concentration in porphyry copper systems of Greece and their genetic significance." Ore Geology Reviews 16, 28–40.
Tarkian, M. & Stribrny, B. (1999). "Platinum-group elements in porphyry copper deposits: a reconnaissance study." Mineralogy and Petrology 65, 161–183. (33-deposit survey; Pd detectable in ~70%, Pt in ~30%; IPGE below detection; merenskyite/sperrylite in chalcopyrite.)
Park, J. W. et al. (2019). "Chalcophile element fertility and the formation of porphyry Cu ± Au deposits." Mineralium Deposita 54, 657–670. (Pd as a chalcophile-fertility indicator; basis for Figs. 03, 06.)
Cocker, H. A., Valente, D. L., Park, J. W. & Campbell, I. H. (2015). "Using platinum group elements to identify sulfide saturation in a porphyry Cu system: the El Abra porphyry Cu deposit, Northern Chile." Journal of Petrology 56, 2491–2514.
Jugo, P. J. (2009). "Sulfur content at sulfide saturation in oxidized magmas." Geology 37, 415–418. (The oxidation control on dissolved sulfur; basis for Fig. 04.)
Mungall, J. E., Brenan, J. M., Godel, B., Barnes, S. J. & Gaillard, F. (2015). "Transport of metals and sulphur in magmas by flotation of sulphide melt on vapour bubbles." Nature Geoscience 8, 216–219. (The bubble-flotation mechanism; basis for Fig. 09.)
Park, J. W., Campbell, I. H., Kim, J. & Moon, J. W. (2015). "The role of late sulfide saturation in the formation of a Cu- and Au-rich magma: insights from the platinum group element geochemistry of Niuatahi-Motutahi lavas, Tonga Rear Arc." Journal of Petrology 56, 59–81. (Natural evidence for sulfide–bubble association.)
Hao, H. D., Campbell, I. H., Richards, J. P., Nakamura, E. & Sakaguchi, C. (2019). "Platinum-group element geochemistry of the Escondida igneous suites, Northern Chile." Journal of Petrology 60, 487–514.
Sillitoe, R. H. (2010). "Porphyry copper systems." Economic Geology 105, 3–41. (Porphyry architecture; basis for Fig. 02.)
New Afton / British Columbia alkalic Cu-Au PGE studies — e.g. LeFort, D. et al. (2011), Economic Geology 106 (Mount Milligan); Sykora, S. et al. (2018) and the two-part New Afton PGE-in-pyrite studies, Frontiers in Earth Science (2023). (Zoned pyrite/magnetite hosting; basis for Fig. 07B.)
Holwell, D. A. et al. (2019). "A metasomatized lithospheric mantle control on the metallogenic signature of post-subduction magmatism." Nature Communications 10, 3511. (Post-subduction Pd enrichment of the lithospheric mantle — discussed as an active hypothesis.)
Cocker, H. A., Valente, D. L., Park, J.-W. & Campbell, I. H. (2015). "Using platinum group elements to identify sulfide saturation in a porphyry Cu system: the El Abra porphyry Cu deposit, northern Chile." Journal of Petrology 56, 2491–2514. Open access: researchonline.jcu.edu.au/64318.
Hao, H., Campbell, I. H. et al. (2017). "Platinum-group element geochemistry used to determine Cu and Au fertility in the Northparkes igneous suites, New South Wales, Australia." Ore Geology Reviews. sciencedirect.com.
Depth over hype. |
This Insight is part of Samso's Sector & Commodity pillar — standalone analysis of the commodities, geology and market structures that shape the ASX small- and mid-cap resource sector. |
Not financial advice. Samso publishes research and education. This note explains the geology of tungsten skarn mineralisation in general terms; it is not a recommendation on any company or security, and deposit specifics should be checked against each company's own disclosures. Investors are expected to do their own work.
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