Porphyry Copper-Molybdenum Deposits of the Pacific Northwest

For more than a decade the Pacific Northwest has been a frontier of successful porphyry copper-molybdenum exploration. This vast region (about 2100 miles long, 350-500 miles wide) occupies a geologically complex mobile tectonic belt. It parallels the Western Cordillera from northern California-Nevada to southern Alaska-Yukon Territory, and west from the northern Rocky Mountain-Tintina Trenches to the Pacific margin. Right lateral displacement has occurred along major transcurrent faults that are sub parallel to the region and the transform Fairweather-Queen Charlotte fault zone separates the North American continental plate from the Pacific oceanic plate. Porphyry-type deposits are widespread, but producing mines are restricted to south and central British Columbia. Size and grade are variable (25 to +300 mt; 0.18 to 0.65% Cu with 0.014 to 0.049% MoS2; 0.14 to 0.28% MoS,) and secondary enrichment is normally unimportant. Metallization is genetically and spatially related to late quartz-feldspar porphyries that are within, marginal, or satellitic to composite batholithic intrusions. Radiometric ages of the plutons range from Miocene to Triassic-Jurassic (18 to 217 m.y. [million year] ). Country rocks are typically eugeosynclinal metasedimentary and metavolcanic assemblages of Permian to Jurassic age. Several of the older (pre-Late Cretaceous) deposits formed in submarine island arc environments and they may be genetically related to occurrences of volcanogenic sulfides in the greenstone country rocks. Deposition of bornite-chalcopyrite-molybdenite ores is controlled by contacts, breccias, and fault-fracture zones. Associated hydrothermal gangue minerals include biotite, orthoclase, sericite, kaolinite, quartz, anhydrite, and tourmaline. Isotopic data suggest a deep source for ore, gangue, and plutonic host rocks. Significant exploration features include porphyries, dike swarms, breccias, potassic alteration, barren quartz cores, gossans, and fringing halos of pyrite and propylitic alteration.