Metal and Ores

Metal and Its Discovery

Metals are opaque, shiny, smooth solids that can conduct electricity and can be bent, drawn into
wire, or hammered into thin sheets. In this regard, they look and behave quite differently from
wood, plastic, meat, or rock. This is because, unlike in other substances, the atoms that make
up metals are held together by metallic bonds, so electrons can ow from atom to atom fairly
easily and atoms can, in effect, slide past each other without breaking apart. The rst metals
that people used copper, silver, and gold can occur in rock as native metals. Native metals
consist only of metal atoms, and thus look and behave like metal.
Gold nuggets, for example, are chunks of native metal that have eroded free of bedrock. Over
the ages, people have collected nuggets of native metal from stream beds and pounded them
together with stone hammers to make arrowheads, scrapers, and later, coins and jewellery. But
if we had to rely solely on native metals as our source of metal, we would have access to only a
tiny fraction of our current metal supply. Most of the metal atoms we use today originated as
ions bonded to non-metallic elements in a great variety of minerals that themselves look nothing
like metal. Only because of the chance discovery by some prehistoric genius that certain rocks,
when heated to high temperatures in re (a process called smelting), decompose to yield metal
plus a non-metallic residue called slag, do we now have the ability to produce sufcient metal
for the needs of industrialized society.

What Is an Ore?
The minerals from which metals can be extracted are called ore minerals, or economic minerals.
These minerals contain metal in high concentrations and in a form that can be easily extracted.
Galena (PbS), for example, is about 50% lead, so we consider it to be an ore mineral of lead.
We obtain most of our iron from haematite and magnetite. Copper comes from a variety of
minerals, none of which look like copper. Geologists have identied a great variety of ore
minerals. Many ore minerals are sulphides, in which the metal occurs in combination with
sulphur (S), or oxides, in which the metal occurs in combination with oxygen (O). To obtain the
metals needed for industrialized society, we mine ore, rock containing native metals or a
concentrated accumulation of ore minerals. To be an ore, rock must not only contain ore
minerals, it must also contain a sufcient amount to make the rock worth mining. Iron constitutes
only about 6.2% of the continental crust's weight but makes up about 30% to 60% of iron ore.
The concentration of a useful metal in an ore determines the grade of the ore the higher the
concentration, the higher the grade. Whether or not an ore of a given grade is worth mining
depends on the price of metal in the market.

How Do Ore Deposits Form?

Ore minerals do not occur uniformly through rocks of the crust. If they did, we would not be able
to extract them economically. Fortunately for humanity, geologic processes concentrate these
minerals into accumulations called ore deposits. Simply put, an ore deposit is an economically
signicant occurrence of ore. The various kinds of ore deposits differ from each other in terms of

which ore minerals they contain and which geologic conditions led to their formation. Below, we
introduce a few examples.

Magmatic deposits

When a magma cools, sulphide ore minerals crystallize early, then, because sulphides tend to
be dense, hey sink to the bottom of the magma chamber, where they accumulate; this
accumulation is a magmatic deposit. When the magma freezes solid, the resulting igneous body
may contain a concentration of sulphide minerals at its base. Because of their composition,
such concentrations are known as massive- sulphide deposits.

Hydrothermal deposits

Hydrothermal activity involves the circulation of hot-water solutions through a magma or through
the rocks surrounding an igneous intrusion. These uids dissolve metal ions. When a solution
enters a region of lower pressure, lower temperature, different acidity, and/ or different
availability of oxygen, the metals come out of solution and form ore minerals that precipitate in
fractures and pores, creating a hydrothermal deposit. Such deposits may form within an igneous
intrusion or in surrounding country rock. If the resulting ore minerals disperse through the
intrusion, we can also call the deposit a disseminated deposit, but if they precipitate to ll cracks
in pre-existing rock, we can call the deposit a vein deposit; veins are mineral-lled cracks. In
recent decades, geologists have discovered that hydrothermal activity at the submarine
volcanoes along mid-ocean ridges leads to the eruption of hot water, containing high
concentrations of dissolved metal and sulphur, from a vent. When this hot water comes in
contact with cold seawater, the dissolved components instantly precipitate as tiny crystals of
metal-sulphide minerals. The erupting water, therefore, looks like a black cloud, so the vents are
called black smokers. The minerals in the cloud eventually sink and form a pile of ore minerals
around the vent. Since the ore minerals typically are sulphides, the resulting hydrothermal
deposits constitute another type of massive-sulphide deposit. Secondary-enrichment deposits.
Sometimes groundwater passes through ore-bearing rock long after the rock rst formed. This
groundwater dissolves some of the ore minerals and carries the dissolved ions away. When the
water eventually ows into a different chemical environment (for instance, one with a different
amount of oxygen or acid), it precipitates new ore minerals, commonly in concentrations
exceeding that of the original deposit. A new ore deposit formed from metals that were dissolved
and carried away from a pre-existing ore deposit is called a secondary-enrichment deposit.
Some of these deposits contain spectacularly beautiful copper-bearing carbonate minerals,
such as azurite and malachite.

MVT ores

Rain falling along one margin of a large sedimentary basin may sink into the subsurface and
then ow as groundwater along a curving path that takes it rst down to the bottom of the basin,
and then eventually back up to the opposite margin of the basin, hundreds of kilometres away.
At the bottom of the basin, temperatures become high enough that the water dissolves metals.
As the water returns to the surface and enters cooler rock, these metals precipitate in ore
minerals. Ore deposits formed in this way, containing lead- and zinc-bearing minerals, appear in
dolomite beds of the Mississippi Valley region of the United States, and thus have come to be
known as Mississippi Valleytype (MVT) ores.

Sedimentary deposits of metals

Some ore minerals accumulate in sedimentary environments under special circumstances. For
example, between 2.5 and 1.8 billion years ago, the atmosphere, which previously had
contained very little oxygen, gained oxygen because of the evolution of abundant photo
synthetic organisms. This change affected the chemistry of seawater so that large quantities of
dissolved iron precipitated as iron oxide minerals that settled as sediment on the sea oor. As
you learned in Chapter 11, the resulting iron-rich sedimentary deposits are known as a banded
iron formation (BIF), because after lithication they consist of alternating beds of Gray iron oxide
(magnetite or haematite) and red beds of jasper (iron-rich chert).
The chemistry of seawater in some parts of the ocean today leads to the deposition of
manganese-oxide minerals on the sea oor. These minerals grow into lumpy accumulations
known as manganese nodules. Mining companies have begun to explore technologies for
vacuuming up these nodules; geoscientists estimate that the worldwide supply of nodules
contains 720 years worth of copper and 60,000 years worth of manganese, at current rates of
consumption.

Residual mineral deposits

Recall from Interlude B that as rainwater sinks into the Earth, it leaches (dissolves) certain
elements and leaves behind others, as part of the process of forming soil. In rainy, tropical
environments, the residue left behind in soils after leaching includes concentrations of iron or
aluminium. Locally, these metals become so concentrated that the soil itself becomes an ore
deposit. We refer to such deposits as residual mineral deposits. Most of the aluminium ore
mined today comes from bauxite, a residual mineral deposit created by the extreme leaching of
rocks (such as granite) containing aluminium-bearing minerals. The figure below shows the
residual mineral deposits as well as placer deposits.

Placer deposits

Ore deposits may develop when rocks containing native metals erode, producing a mixture of
sand grains and metal akes or nuggets (pebble-sized fragments). For example, gold
accumulates in sand or gravel bars along the course of rivers, for the moving water carries away
lighter mineral grains (quartz and feldspar) but cant move the heavy metal grains (gold) so
easily. Concentrations of metal grains in stream sediments are a type of placer deposit. Panning
further concentrates gold akes or nuggets swirling water in a pan causes the lighter sand
grains to wash away, leaving the gold behind.

Where Are Ore Deposits Found?

The Inca Empire of fteenth-century Peru boasted elaborate cities and temples, decorated with
fantastic masks, jewellery, and sculptures made of gold. Then, around 1532, Spanish ships
arrived, led by conquistadors who quipped, We Spaniards suffer from a disease that only gold
can cure. The Incas, already weakened by civil war, were no match for the armorclad
Spaniards with their guns and horses. Within six years, the Inca Empire had vanished, and
Spanish ships were transporting Inca treasure back to Spain. Why did the Incas possess so
much gold? Or to ask the broader question, what geologic factors control the distribution of ore?
Once again, we can nd the answer by considering the consequences of plate tectonics.
Several of the ore-deposit types mentioned above occur in association with igneous rocks.
Igneous activity does not happen randomly around the Earth, but rather concentrates along
convergent plate boundaries (specically, in the overriding plate of a subduction zone), along
divergent plate boundaries (along mid-ocean ridges), continental rifts, or hot spots. Thus,
magmatic and hydrothermal deposits (and secondary-enrichment deposits derived from these)
occur in these geologic settings. Placer deposits are typically found in the sediments eroded
from such magmatic or hydrothermal deposits. The Inca gold formed in the Andes along a
convergent plate boundary.