The Metallogenic Setting of Terminal Orogenic Gold Deposits

Abstract

This thought project is focused on the time and place of gold concentration within orogens, the most complex of the tectonic settings resulting from plate interactions. The author has been engaged in gold exploration over his 50-year career and takes this occasion for reflection on “what I think I learned”. When overwhelmed by the wealth of immediate field evidence, combined with the mountains of petrographic and geochemical data it is nigh impossible “to see the forest for the trees”. All too often reporting of specific “data sets” passes as the goal of science while the real problem, i.e. what all the evidence in combination adds up to, is never engaged. This is an effort to step back and take a larger view of the bigger picture painted by the various roles played by regional and thermal metamorphism, plutonism and volcanism, as well as marine and terrestrial sedimentation within hydrothermal environments of gold concentration.