31. Porphyry Systems - from Bottom to Top

(upbeat music) - Hey everyone, thanks for joining us again. So after our holiday break, we are back for the rest of season three. Here to bring you more great geoscience stories from the world of ore deposits. This podcast is a production of the society of economic geologists. We're sponsored by ALS Gold Spot Discoveries, a technology company that believes in the power of combining expert geoscientists with data analysis and artificial intelligence. They work across commodity types, deposit styles, and data sources to solve some of the top problems in mining and mineral exploration. I'm Ann Thompson, a partner in petri-science consultants, and I'm your host for this episode. In our most recent episode, Sam Weatherly explored the weird and wonderful world of carbonatites, host to rare earth elements and other critical metals. Now, we move back into the more familiar territory of the silicate magmatic hydrothermal systems for the first of three episodes, covering the entire porphyry to every thermal transition. (upbeat music) Today's episode highlights the work of FAMOS, a UK-based research consortium. This multi-institution interdisciplinary project was conceived by the members of the mineral deposit studies group in the UK, which is a division of the geological society of London. The idea was to bring researchers and industry together to answer some big and deep questions in our understanding of the magmatic hydrothermal processes that lead to the formation of porphyry deposits. It was an ambitious and innovative proposal that resulted in major funding from the UK scientific funding body, NERC. To provide us with the big picture overview of their work, we turn to Jamie Wilkinson from the Natural History Museum in London, England, who leads, or he might say, heard the FAMOS consortium. I spoke to Jamie last August on the conference floor of SEG 2022 in Denver, where he presented some of the ideas and results from the project, as it reaches its final stages of the work plan. So, we're here to talk about magmatic plumbing systems, I hope, and what the processes are that go on to actually create a fertile porphyry system. But first and foremost, tell us who you are, and how did you get at the Natural History Museum doing plumbing in the basement, so the, I don't know. Well, thanks for the invitation to talk to you, Anne. So, my name's Jamie Wilkinson, I'm a research leader in the Natural History Museum. I've been for eight years, and my background has been geochemistry, generally. I guess, early on in my career, I just found that all deposits were the most interesting place to apply that research trade. From all angles? From all angles, yeah. From big scales to big scales. Yeah, so early on, probably I was more focused on more audit-positive scale kind of studies. I did a lot fluid chemistry, fluid inclusion work. What did you do in your graduate work? In my PhD? Yeah. Yeah, well, that was my first real exposure to economic geology at Sapampton with Bob Foster. So, I wasn't working on audit-positive per se. I was working on risk and tectonic evolution and fluid flow during metamorphism, so on in the southwest England. In the risk and belt, looking at fluid evolution through the whole origin of cycle, which then included the final stage of granite emplacement and the hydrothermal systems, obviously tin tungsten mineralisation. Sap was kind of like part of my story, but it was the tail end, really. It was looking at the whole evolution of a piece of crust through a whole origin cycle from a fluid migration, fluid chemistry point of view. But skills and knowledge that's completely applicable to what you're doing now. Yeah. Yeah. In that sense, I'm just process-wise. Moving fluids. Moving fluids in. Just to create the simplistic view of the object. And then sort of, yeah, the interest in audit-positive then grew and surrounding students at the time, my friends were all working on kind of more conventional audit-positive type studies, especially in gold. And that's where it began. But more recently, I've moved more into the mineral chemistry and actually, patrology, so I'm a sort of wannabe patrologist. These days? Bit of a jack-of-all day. Does anybody do patrology these days? Well, some of the collaborators are in a famous project, do you? But, yeah, so it's kind of how I've ended up getting into this porphyry, magnatic space. Right. So, tell me about famous. I mean, what a name is that. Famous, yeah. So, I'm so famous. Find that one. Famous, is it famous? I mean, it's gotta be famous. Yeah, so, you have to have an acronym, Analoga, from these awards, so, yeah, you have to try and find a project title that yields up a suitable acronym. So, from Art Magnus to Ours, or Systems, was our famous chemo. Right, from Art Magnus to Ours systems, of course. So, that's how it got its name. It came about through this process of a community idea. So, in the UK, the audit-positive research community is mainly organized through the Minorbit-positive studies group. So, the community has, in recent years, worked together much more effectively at trying to get significant funding, rather than as a series of individual kind of institutional groups and been successful. So, famous was a community idea to propose what's called a highlight-topic idea to NERC to do something in this porphyry. Magnatic space and using mineral chemistry to both interpret processes that are going on in that kind of system and how those minerals might record signatures that could be useful for exploration, discriminating fertile environments. What are all the different kinds of research that have gone on in this project? I guess one of the arguments for why could deliver some novel findings was to bring together a patrology community in the UK. So, some top patrologists who traditionally haven't worked necessarily much on economic geology problems. With the audit-positive community, obviously, no fair bit about porphyry as another kinds of magnetic systems and to bring those two groups together. Plus, the sort of third spoke, if you like, was this numerical modeling side to models of the physical processes of magma and fluid flow in the crusts, through Matt Jackson's group Imperial. So, bringing those three different elements together, audit-positive geology, mineralogy, experts, the patrologists and this sort of physical modeling capability, other three sort of components. Which do you do first? Or do you do it all simultaneously? We'll do it all simultaneously, yeah, yeah. All simultaneously, isn't it? The project's designed to try and effectively integrate those three things, not do them completely separately, but clearly, from the start, we tried to advise the programme so that they would connect naturally and that people wouldn't just be working on their own specific thing, they would have to collaborate with people from the other institutions involved on specific parts of the programme. So, the individual research tasks were designed to look at a process element, rather than a discipline element, if you like, so which brings the different people together. Which brings different people together across boundaries. So, give it an example. Where's the successes or what are you learning? Actually, maybe the best place to start would be sort of the components of the project. So, we're trying to understand how arch-magnets evolve in a certain way that they become fertile for poor-free mineralisation. So, predisposed to form a deposit. We're not looking at the deposits themselves. We're basically looking at the processes that lead up to a magma that could make a deposit from the mantle right through into the shallow crustal kind of emplacement. But where do you even start? We're so used to looking at or deposits and that's the environment we're used to studying. So, if you're talking about the plumbing systems, where do you look? Yeah, so it's partly field-based, so identifying areas where you can actually interrogate parts of that story directly. So, the rock record. So, one of the work-packaged tasks is the rock record. So, that's actually looking at the events for various processes. And, for example, that would include places where the lower crustal cumulate section might be exposed. So, the ivory zone has been one area where? The which zone? The ivory zone. Where is that? In the Alps. Oh, okay. So, that's one place where a lower crustal section, cumulate section is exposed where you can actually look at what's there. So, that's one of the study sites and then samples from places like the Pakistan sections where the cumulate, but lower crustal cumulates are exposed. So, samples from places like that, where you can interrogate that deep crustal environment. Serving the crust directly, theoretically, considering what might happen and then experimentally modeling, what could happen in an experiment and then extrapolating that to what might happen in the crust. So, there's different ways of looking at the problem, if you like, and then, obviously, trying to bring those things together. And, are you? Well, where are you in this process? So, yeah, I mean, we're sort of, obviously, COVID delays in the middle of the project didn't help, but we're less than a year from the end. So, now, as the stage where quite a few of the results are coming together and we're starting to integrate them. It's not very easy, not very easy to connect everything, especially in an expert in all those fields, which I'm not. Right, right, nothing. So, you can't take me on a tour from the mantle up through this plumbing system and tell me what happens along the way. Sort of half. Create my favourite porphyry. Yeah, I can half do that. I guess the presentation I'm giving here is trying to do that and it's not really focusing too much on the mantle source melting in strains. Which is so hard, I mean, to be honest, there's got to be the most difficult part, yeah. Yeah, it's difficult to do. But taking a magma you've generated is a basaltic magma in the mantle, moving it into the lower crust. There are then several different things that can happen. So, one of the ways we framed the proposal was looking at different gates. So, looking at specific processes that could influence the pathway that a magma then follows. One of those is-- Scenarios, really. So, one of those is what happens in the lower crust to chap of our elements and whether they get trapped there in sulfide. So, that's what we would call a gate, and it might be a negative gate. So, if you take them all out there-- If you take them all out there, then they're done. So, how important is that sulfide trap for preventing porphyry fertility, if you like? Or how do you escape that? How do you get away from that? And there's kind of two possibilities that emerge at the moment. One is based on the argument that, essentially, most art magmas, even if highly oxidized, experimentative data shows now that you will sulfide saturate. So, escaping that is problematic. And two ways that you might be able to do that. One is that you have a very high magma flux and rapid descent. You may be able to avoid significant sulfide saturation at that level. Right. So, if you get it out of there really fast-- Get it out of there fast. Right. So, how would you get it out of there really fast? Well, potentially-- Yeah, potentially a tectonic sort of tectonic trigger. I mean, there are-- So, the evidently data set that supports that is a central volcanic-- a sudden volcanic zone data set, a whole rock data that shows that most of the volcanic products show evidence for sulfide saturation. The evolution path is fractionation. So, with magnesium oxide, decreasing the fractionation, you see depletion in copper. And you see the decrease in copper silver ratio that's suggesting a sulfide saturating. In the lower crust and in the volcanic products that make it up to the top of effectively lost their copper. But there are a couple of places where you don't see that, where you see a significant increase in copper and copper silver ratio with differentiation that shows that the low is particular magmas of escape. They've got away from lower crustal death. And, as you like, you know, and via recurrenting of two of the volcanoes that do that. And they also have the ones with the highest magma fluxes as quantified from erupted products. So, that's where the idea came that something to do with magma flux and maybe rapid migration has allowed those to escape significant sulfide saturation in depth. So, that's one scenario, one possibility. The other is less the team, Dave Holwell's team, working on is looking at what might happen to sulfides in the lower crustal cumulative. And the evidence from the ivory zone suggests that they may be in a temperature window, but maybe true for other crustal cumulative sections as well, where the sulfide could be present as a liquid. So, the nickel sulfide would be solid, but the copper ISS liquid would remain as liquid, just in a certain temperature window where. - Just because of the temperature. - So, you're in the right temperature window for potentially the copper-rich sulfide liquid to remain liquid. And then you have the capability to extract that. So, the mechanism for that is speculative, whether you carry it as droplets attached to the bottle. - It was, I would say, so how does it so well? - Yeah, we've talked about drobbles and on the podcast previously. - Exactly, so that's why-- - Now the vapor carries the metal with it and the new, yeah. - You've re-dissolved it, sort of higher up. Or you flex another melt through that and re-dissolve it, or some mechanism for then mobilizing that sulfide. So, in the rock record evidence, there's evidence from mobilization of the copper sulfide liquid through the cumulative. Obviously, only over distances of millimeters or centimeters, but it is mobile, so the idea is, can you then extract that and carry it up to the-- - How far can that be? - So, what would the distance, I mean, that's a fair way as you're trying to carry it, isn't it? - Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, you have to be able to mobilise that copper rich liquid all the way up into the shallow crust, somehow, if it's a viable scenario. And then, perhaps, if that happens in some places, but not in others, that's how you explain the sort of, you know, the rarity of porcelain, if you like, you know, that most of the time, whatever form that charcoal file element budget is being trapped in in the lower crust, some places, maybe, it's the localised places that you're able to mobilise that, that why those magmas are more photofuertile. So, that's a lower crust also, like, trap part. And there's new experimental results that kind of reinforcing and building on previous experiments to look at what the stability of a crystallising phase assemblage would be under different PT conditions in water saturated basaltic melts. And that's kind of reinforced to what the previous studies showed that if you're in average crustal thickness, 40 kilometres or so thick, you'd be in water saturated basalt, you'd be crystallising it. So, a plagiarclase amphibol type of assemblage. So, quite a lot, plagiarclase crystallisation. And that, in parts, a certain signature on the magma, which is what we find is not associated with fertile porphyry system. So, a plagiarclase crystallising assemblage leads to development of e-ropium anomaly. - Okay. - So, that's kind of the signature, kind of, - Which you can see, you can see in writes, you can see in what we normally see at the surface or in. - Yeah, so, in your porphyry rocks, or typical argrots, we'd have that sort of signature of a plagiarclase potentially amphibol fractionation, but plagiarclase present assemblage crystallising. And that's not what you want. - Right. - So, what you want is what you find if you. - Falsification is a good thing. - Yeah, exactly. And that's what you normally see, and that's what a normal arc intermediate to felsic rock would have, that sort of signature. But if you're in a thickened crust for 50 or 60 kilometers, then the stable phase assemblage then shifts, you jump out of plagiarclase, the ability and you'd be in an amphibol client of peroxine, plus or minus garnets, the ability window. And because you're fractionating those different phases with different partition behavior for trace elements, then you have a very different trace element signature in the magma that then passes out of that environment. So, thickened crust in parts that particular signature that we then find associated with porphyry system specifically, which is a, you know, high strontium-itrium ratio, lack of a negative Europa minimally, that type of characteristic or a spoon-shaped rear-earth profile, which you've got sort of depletion in the middle. - So essentially proposing a scenario or a model which explains those two things we observe at the surface in terms of. - Yeah, and that's not a new observation, obviously, but we're just kind of reinforcing that understanding that the trace element characteristics that seem to be quite strongly associated with magma is associated, spatially and temporally associated with porphyry deposits, they have that characteristic. And you can explain that from the experiment of data by the pressure temperature conditions under which fractionation is occurred in the crust. - So that's kind of like how experimental data is sort of feeding in to the story. And then if you move shallower, that's all right. - Right, yeah, go shallower, yeah, now please go shallower because when people start to understand what's going on. - So moving, moving this fractionated magma from a lower crustal environment upwards. And then we're starting to, I guess in the conventional model, it would be building some sort of magma chamber, but we're sort of working on the paradigm that's more increasingly accepted in the patrology literature that you just don't have a liquid-rich convecting magma chamber. - So what we all learned in university or the models that show this big bowl of magma is not actually sitting there? - No, so I think it's more widely accepted that it's a more crustal mush zone continuum. It's largely a crystal-rich environment with small melt proportion. That's relatively cool and you're injecting more basic material into it that's progressively fractionating and evolving, but it's never a large-live liquid. - Large liquid, regular. - So that's kind of the framework for some of the physical modeling of magma, flow and reactive flow, which is where the process of evolution of the chemistry of the melt and the crystals is not governed by those sort of processes you envisage in this typical magma chamber kind of context that the migration of melt through this crystal mush is reacting with the crystals that are present and the evolution of the chemistry is controlled by that process more than traditionally. - Just completely different, I mean, it's really cool. - So that's kind of framework for that physical modeling with a bit of chemistry involved in it as well. But irrespective in some ways of how you get there, what we're then looking at in the rock record is the sort of detailed case studies of the plutonic to porphyry evolution of some of the key districts. So it's sort of the jewel and the cryo of the case studies would be the Rio Blanca Loss Bronsor's district. Central Chile, the angle of giving us fantastic access to sample and build on their existing data sets. So we have a quite remarkable temporal record of the evolution of that district in terms of the construction of the San Francisco bathless, the precursor to the porphyry systems that onset of sub-economic porphyry and placement towards the end of that bathless construction and then into the main porphyry window at the end of that construction site. - And what's that time? - So yeah, so that time span is about 10 million years and that's all being intruded into the precursor's thick volcanic package of the Abernico and Farrell and it's from our performances. We also have a volcanic record, quite a detail of volcanic record through the volcanic stratigraphy that's leading up to the point at which you start to construct the bathless then starts to be in place within that. And that's quite a common sequence that we see in major porphyry districts that precursor's long-term surface volcanism, building up a thick volcanic package that then evolves towards a plutonic emplacement phase that's initially batholithic at five to 10 kilometers depth potentially but then evolves into the porphyry phase potentially through shallowing again. You know, you're maybe potentially shallower depths. You're exhuming it once you're starting to put to replace the porphyry. - So that other element of uplift happening and a room of presumably such that year. - Yeah, yeah. - There are a lot of processes in this. - Yeah. - So it's not that that's surprising. - So we've got this long-term record there and in the care of echo district and other district where we've been doing that and some work also in fortuna complex and chooky. So there's this big district where there's a long-term bathless construction stage. That's the same timescale actually about 10 million years and then several million years window in which multiple porphyry phases then come in. And we're looking at the whole archeochemistry evolution in that and the mineral chemistry. Tracking what processes are that what changes when you could go from that unfertile batholithic phase to the fertile porphyry phase. And you see that shift from the plagiarclase of fractionated signature which is suggesting that the batholith phase is being sourced from magmas that have crystallized and fractionated, maybe relatively dry bitness or mid-crustle, the lower pressure condition where plagiarclase is stable. And that shifts. So when you go into the porphyry fertile stage you then get the signature of deeper fractionation - Deep fractionation. - where they have a whole higher processing garnet and largely lack of plagiarclase. So it's interpretation is that representing a deepening source of the magma that's feeding the fertile porphyry stage. - With still some conduit or a way it got there. - Yeah, and it may be saying conduits, but perhaps it's coming from deeper, maybe it's structurally controlled or maybe it's coming up faster, but it's big source from greater depth at that point. And obviously that's associated with some changes. - Right, and then we make that more fertile magma. - Right, and that's the big question. So what those changes are and how we can observe them or recognize that that's what's happened. - So the record of whole rock and a zircon chemistry can track that switch from normal art magmatism to the fertile state, representing this deepening locus of fractionation and evolution. But tells you that the system's kind of gone the right direction, but not the details of what the importance of that is. So we also look at other minerals like appetite. It's been particularly useful because that's the sort of igneous appetite can trace the volatile record of them out. And what that suggests from studies in re-blankylospronsis and also caveco to some extent and previous work from one of my PhDs and Emily Grusion and La Granhae and Peru shows that there's a change in the sulfur content and the chlorine content of the appetites of tracking melt composition in terms of those volatiles but also potentially oxidation state could be involved. But it's an evolution from lower chlorine in the baffler stage to higher chlorine contents in the appetites which may be reflecting an increase in chlorine content of the melt as you move into the poor free fertile stage and increase in sulfur content too. Which in appetite is either a function of melt sulfur content increasing or increased oxidation state of the melt which increases the partitioning of sulfur into the appetite or both. So separating those is tricky but there is a clear change into the appetites that are associated with a poor free phase. But we only see that record importantly in appetite inclusions in zircon which has been quite a focus of our power work. The reason being that when you're in a poor free environment there's oral, the rocks are all altered. We see it all post. - Alteration is such a problem. - Let me just get to the way of everything. Most igneous eye-defermal labor printing which we've got good evidence is just totally modifying any of the matrix microfeinacrist appetite chemistry to diffusion or regeneration. - So you see a look for appetite inclusions that are basically in a fortress as well? - In a fortress that hasn't been cracked. - So the pristine igneous record is in those inclusions whereas maybe potentially appetite inclusions in other resistant igneous phases or at least don't show evidence for alteration. But the matrix ones surrounded by serocytic alteration are all modified, they evolve in their composition towards pure hydrothermal appetites which you get frequently in. Potastic stage veins, serocytic stage veins, prolatic stage veins, you get hydrothermal appetites and the igneous ones get modified towards those sort of compositions in fact. So if you want to understand the igneous record and the importance of the igneous volatile story for fertility, we think it's in those appetite inclusions basically. - Which is difficult to analyze. They're not very big. - They're like, so we're talking from the scales, we're talking, you know, magma's moving over tens of kilometers or, yeah, large distances down to scale of an appetite inclusion in a zircon. - Yeah. - To actually-- - Five microns wide and-- - Right, and then what tools are you using for that? - So I mean, it's using a microphone with a fine beam and there's difficulties in analyzing halogen, especially fluorine content in appetite, the best of time. So you have to be careful about how you do that and with laser ablation. But again, with a finer beam, 'cause I think of laser ablation as being a bigger spot. - Yeah, and normally we use a 35 micron spot or bigger, but for the appetite inclusions, we've been doing with a five micron spot. So you have to do quite a lot of development to show analytically the quality of the data is good, which we've done and which we've shown you can do it. - Yeah, 'cause you're not actually detecting that much, either if it's a five micron. There's not much material there. - No, so detection limits aren't as good as a bigger spot, obviously, but you can measure quite a range of trace elements. - Yeah. - We get a full wear of pattern, for example. So that's been, yeah, that's been quite important. So technological development, set some light on that sort of volatile record. - I guess one thing, the other last thing I should probably mention from an industry point of view is that we're not doing this all just for the science and the understanding we part of our delivery and the last work package of the research is to translate the understanding of what makes certain magnets fertile into tools that can be used in exploration to improve exploration success. So particularly through the avenue of certain minerals that are record some of the key signatures of the processes that we can discriminate, magnets have gone through this fertile pathway from ones that haven't. So maybe minerals are then reworked into stream settlements and so on, not just sampling rocks. So we're doing that, and we're doing that, using some approaches. Conventional things, but also using machine learning and you can use a basket of elements in a multivariate sense and have a much more powerful and quantifiable predictive tool. So we've got some machine learning algorithms for whole rock that can distinguish poor, free, associated signatures to a probability of, you know, 90% likelihood of being correctly identifying a rock that's associated with a fertile porphyry system. And then we can do the same thing for zircon chemistry. Chetan, I thought I knew my students done some combining of appetite and the consignals to sort of bring those two things together because they tell us different things. The appetite's more telling us about the volatile story that a system that has the right kind of ingredients and the zircon's telling us more about that called district scale. So it brings two different aspects of the fertility story together when you're combining different minerals. And we've also done some image convolutional neural network stuff, can you recognize texturally zircons that have the right characteristics associated with the fertile stage of evolution of a district, so that they tend to be more euthedral and more strongly zoned in catholium essence. So again, Chetan's developed a neural network approach that can actually recognize those automatically with quite a high degree of certainty. So that's kind of interesting. It's only just starting that sort of work, but it shows that not just geochemically, but in terms of physical, physical, textural characteristics of the mineral. So I think there are some tools emerging that would be, hopefully, quite-- It would be interesting. Quite useful, but also quantifiable in that-- probably probability on the likelihood that they're giving you the right answer. It's just massive actually thinking about bringing all these parts together. Yeah, so there's more work to be done cohesives. Yeah, to link some of the things, especially physical modeling, a huge amount of work, had to be done just to develop the code to model the magma flow and its reactive transport in three dimensions, which is what's being done. It hasn't been done before, so something's being done that hasn't been done before anywhere. And it's now for simulations are really only just starting to come out of that work. I mean, I think so many of us are particularly out here in the exploration world. We're not used to thinking about those kinds of models that it's a whole different world. And they're very illuminating. We're already the initial things have shown some very unusual behavior that are not intuitive, that you wouldn't imagine could happen. But physically, these models seem to show that you can do some strange things. Yes, it really is mind boggling how many things you cover. Well, I mean, one aspect of the research is that how much fun it's been to work with people from different disciplines. So this crossed the boundaries and being interdisciplinary, I think, everyone in the consortium has found interesting and inspiring and very enjoyable to be outside their normal comfort space and be talking to people who have come from a different perspective. And it's worked really well. I mean, it could have gone completely wrong. Nobody worked together. I think everyone's been really happy in the consortium to be sort of integrated. Do you think the patrologists are learning things from the order of positive people? Or is it more the other way around? Well, it feels like me, to me, it's more the other way around being a wannabe patrologist of the land. But I think you can be quite narrow in your view of your subject if that's what you always work on. And that other people have other information and knowledge that makes you look at your data in perhaps in a different light. It might be, it might be considering more, what the effects of weathering or alteration might be the previously just in the order. Or that not all magnets necessarily go through this sort of conventional path you might have typically envisaged that they go through that actually some quite different things can happen. Elena Melakova is an experimental patrologist at Oxford University, one of the many researchers within the Famous Consortium. We talked to her about what experimental patrology offers to the understanding of earth processes and/or formation, the value of collaboration and the connection for her between coal and biscuits. - My name is Elena Melakova. I'm an experimental patrologist in the earth sounds department University of Oxford. I'm from Siberia. And I think as a child, I've been always surrounded by amazing geology, but as a child, I wasn't interested in geology. I was near a big gold mines, oil and gas mines. I was racing a small town which was full of which villages and my parents, civil engineers, who worked around geology community. As a child, I saw amazing Kimberlite pipes in Mirney and it was all fascinated, but I was not interested in geology as a child. But I think my love for love work was probably from childhood. My grandmother was a lab technician in coal factory and they had a day shifts and night shifts. And when they had night shifts, sometimes she took me as a child there and they had to test a coal for moisture and ash and they had beautiful, very well calibrated pictures, now no ovens and beautiful balances. There's lots of different weights in a small boxes, visit visas for the smallest weights and they had to burn it and then wait. And I was allowed to play with that because at night shifts usually was not senior people there. But was they also done there? Because the ovens were excellent, as I know now. They did bake biscuits and biscuits were absolutely amazing because the chips of the ovens were so good. So biscuits and love work is a good combination. Exactly. And I still think remember the smell of mixture of burning coal and the biscuits. And I did my undergraduate degree at the Kutsk State University. And then I started my PhD. All said it's sort of Earth's cross, but I was doing something completely different. I was doing a question of states of minerals, thermodynamic calculations. And two years into my PhD, I went for a conference in Zurich. And I saw PhD position in experimental pathology open there with leading supervisor Mark Schmidt. I was not interested, I was happy. But my Zen advice from Russia, he said, "It's a great opportunity you have to apply." And I said, "I don't have any evenest patrology background, leave alone experimental pathology." And also my English was very bad, my German didn't exist. But my Russian supervisor Zen said, "You have to." And he joked, he said, "If you don't apply, I will apply you." So he was persistent and I'm very grateful for him now. So when I applied, so I was at the conference in April, I applied in May end of August, I was in Zurich. Wow. And started dropping my PhD in Russia and starting my PhD in ETH Zurich. And a supervision of Mark Schmidt and Peter Olma. So as I said, my English was very good. And Mark was unbelievably patient. And Peter showed me the magic of experimental pathology. And I think I've fallen in love with that. And this is where it's all started. Right, yeah. That's some kind of mentorship, sponsorship to be told. You'll be fired if you don't apply. Yes, yes, so I was grateful. And I think at that time, I didn't understand how lucky I was to end up at ETH Zurich and be supervised by two leading experimental pathologists and learning from them. I think only later I appreciated my luck. That's amazing. So now you're at Oxford and you are running labs and facilities, but also doing your own research. So how does that work in your daily life? I'm always impressed by people who have those dual roles. I think it's really depends. So I don't find it difficult because we have an amazing group here. And I have a very supportive mentor here, Bernie Wood, who is by my side all the time, for any help I need. Our lab is growing now. We have new equipment, three piston cylinders. We have multi-and-wheel. We have several one-administerial furnaces. We have cold seals. And we are dating currently. So with all of our equipment, we can carry experiments from anything from law crafts now to the deep mantle. And because our group is quite diverse, we're looking for everything in crystal processes down mantle processes and early planetary formation. And I think because the group is very engaged and a manageable size, we're about 12 people now. There are challenges, but generally, I don't find it very difficult because we also have here an amazing workshop. And lab cannot exist without a good workshop. And the big things we change parts to fix, we could be quite demanding. We want to do some new sort of experiments. We need to build new assemblies. Recently, we built pressure controllers for piston cylinders. We needed suddenly extra piston cylinder because we are growing. And they always vary responsive. And it's very important because I have such a great group of people around me. I don't find it difficult. So you might need to actually define what is an experimental patrologist. Wow, it's very interesting. I didn't think about it. Experimental patrologist, I think I can describe it. We're trying to recreate planetary processes in a little capsule. We put this capsule under pressure, temperature, different oxidation states and see what happens. That's a good description. Yeah, I mean, as close as you can get to imagine you're seeing what might happen in places that we'll never see. Exactly. So we can look inside of the earth using the experiments. So planetary patrology also quite a broad field. There is a purely theoretical experimental patrology, which is probably in the border with material science. So what I do is close to the nature. I combine field work with experiments. And a lot recently with geophysics, trying to link everything together, trying to reproduce what is happening in real world. I want to know how you found first trying to interact and do research with economic geologists. So you became part of the Phamus project, which is multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary. Did you find it interesting to engage with economic geologists? How to communicate? Actually, my undergraduate degree is an exploration geologist. So you go way back. I don't think many people know. I didn't know. I haven't done. But I haven't done anything since I finished my undergraduate. So being involved in Phamus was actually quite exciting. And it was a very interesting experience to work inside of the project, which actually had collaboration with industry. It was interesting and challenging. I think we just had a last meeting before Christmas of Phamus. And I think it was super exciting. In my opinion, the project was very successful in spite of the COVID pandemic in the middle of that. And we learned a lot. But it also was clear that maybe we have the same aim with industry, but how we get to this aim is very different. So it's a scientist who is more interested in the process, which is leading to mineralization. We try and understand how it happens. And this industry I felt that they wanted the magic ratio, but it will tell them, dig here. And you will find the all two positive things. The industry people brought. It's a sample. Access to the amazing data sets. And unintentionally, they did keep us focused. Because as scientists, we sometimes going in lots of different direction. And because industry people were there, and we wanted that interaction. We were trying to stay a bit more focused than we usually would be. And I think also-- so it was, as you said, quite an interdisciplinary multi-institutional project. We had a lot of interesting discussions, which led to new discoveries and better understanding of the porphyry systems. Yeah. So I think we've kind of merged into my next question, which was, you know, what were the benefits or the challenges of working in that kind of group? Yes, I think that was also a big benefit being in such a big project with the industry, because just think as a site and the arguments. It's helped you to strengthen your theory and develop your experimental sit-ups. And what would you like to do next? Then what would you like to test? Exactly. So did they bring anything to you industry that caused you to think differently or illuminated process for you that you might not have thought of? Actually, indeed, because early on in the project, it was suggested that one of the magic ratios, which I mentioned, it's a strong census each year, indicates that porphyry magmas have to be very wet, because this ratio indicates that larger clays need to be suppressed, and then people need to be dominant face to move this ratio. So this is kind of drove my part of the farmer's project. And I did experiments on very wet magmas and show that actually, yes, magmas probably wet, but they don't explain this ratio, because even in very wet magmas, it's very difficult to eliminate larger clays from crystallizing. So we need to look at other ways to explain why this ratio is very high in porphyry deposes what they actually showing. So we know what it's not showing anymore, but we don't know what it is showing. We have some ideas, but we need to test it out. Yes, but I'm just, so you might not need to agree, but this is what initiates the project you're starting to test and try to understand. That was actually something which drove design of my experiments. And I was trying to understand how these two elements partition, what they control by, and the experiments were built around that. And then we tried to compare the experimental melt to porphyry magmas. And we showed the experimental melt and what this ratio was proposing looks nothing like porphyry magmas. So this is not the answer. So the processes forming these magmas is different. So it's useful, even if you disagree, it's still very interesting. It's very interesting. So how long do your experiments normally run? Oh, it depends. It depends what you're looking at. It depends at the temperature. And it depends if you're working with the wet system and dry system. Because if you're working with wet systems, experiments are very usually shorter. Because kinetic is faster. If you're working at dry system with a very low temperature kinetics is very slow. I have a PhD student who just was doing experiments on natural dry scorian. Her experiments were a week long. Sometimes experiments take months. But if it's wet system, very hot system experiments that could be just few hours. But for some project, warm, successful experiment is already a success. That's true. So anything else about the famus experience that stood out for you, that we should talk about, or the work that you did? So I find working in consortiums like famus is fascinating. And I learned a lot because I was involved in the periphery of a big consortium grant called Walla, Walla tiles cycling in Las Antilles. And Las Antilles' magnetic system, which I've been working for the last 15 years, so it's why I was involved. So as famus, it was interdisciplinary. So lots of geophysics there. So I would put two parallels between them. Because when you put even using geology, if you put people from different perspectives from geophysics, structured geologists, it's very interesting. You learn and you understand the natural processes much better. I think that was a great experience. And also you build in collaboration. You build in clink with different people. You becoming, I think, more open-minded. And you question not someone ideas, but you question also your own ideas, because it doesn't mean that you're always right. And for me, it's always beneficial to work with people who do a lot of field work, structured geologists, field geologists, and geophysicists, because it helps me to constrain my experiments and make them closer to nature. That's a vital message. We talk so much about how field work is important, but we don't talk about how you coordinate people that do the work that you do, which is also vital with that field or structure, all those other things. And these kinds of situations where you're interacting with other people, essentially, in teams or big consortium, that's, you can do it. Yes, I think that is very interesting process of learning from us. You also get to go to some cool places. That picture of you at the volcano is next to the magma, it's pretty cool. Yes, yes, I've been very lucky. I had, as I said, I've been working on Les Antilles for the last 15 years. And I had three field campaigns there, and we're planning another one this March, because I'm recent eruption on some Vincent. But I think the most memorable for me it would be field trip to New Hebrides. For Noatu, we had to sail between the islands because it was only way to go and be in concerted remote, not very well studied, was very, very interesting. Not only geologically, but also culturally, because it's still tribal people and the ways they live and the ways they interact between each other. Yeah, it was. Yeah, less than you would think you're only in the lab, still eating biscuits and burning coal. No, it's why I enjoy concerted remote, because I do like nature inspires you. And it's very easy to carry away from the reality in the lab space. I think sometimes even experimental patrologists need to go on the field and check what is going on in the real world. Excellent. So I think the final question was, what can experimental patrology offer to support or constrain porphyia or deposit models? So we've talked around that a bit. And I think it just may be in your words, like to hear what you think it offers to the actual porphyry deposit model. So in the field, we can see their final stage. If we talk about porphyry deposit, you see the porphyry deposit. And this is it, it's a snapshot. How it happened, why it happened in this particular place? As you know very well yourself, it's not everywhere. So it's only in particular places. And why it is in that places? And what the ingredients need is to create mineralization? This is where experimental patrology can help. We can test the processes we can test. Is the biggest role of this as the crust? Is it remelting? Is it a bit mud mass? As we talked earlier, or some other ingredients. And usually it's a combination of several. And this is where experimental patrology comes. Right, the anchors constrain us. I think we can help to try to understand the process which flaps to the mineralization, I think. But we cannot do it without connecting it to the field, to the real rocks, to the geophysics, to the tectonic people. It's a combination process. And I think when we design experiments, we try to keep everything in mind. It's not always possible, but we try to come as close as possible to the nature and to replicate the processes in nature. You may be wondering at this point, why industry partners support this fundamental research. Next up, we talked to Christian Islandfeld from Anglo-American for his take on the value of this research from an industry perspective. OK, yeah, well, hi, Anne. And thanks very much for having me on. It's a real pleasure and privilege. I'm Christian Islandfeld. I am principal mineral system geoscientist for basin-hosted mineral systems at Anglo-American. I'm based in London in the UK. I've been in my current role for about two years. And prior to this, most of my career has been in geochemistry, including six years as principal geochemistry at Anglo-American. And during that time as principal geochemistry I was driving and supervising much of Anglo's geochemistry related research, including the Famous Project. So this is where my involvement in the Famous Project came from. I've been with Anglo-American for 15 years now. It's quite a long time. And in various geochemistry related roles, as I said. And so while my current focus is on sediment-hosted systems, I've worked extensively on magnetic nickel sulfide systems, a lot on all three systems over the years globally. So I've been really fortunate with Anglo having had the opportunity to work with amazing people and on some amazing projects around the globe. So before joining Anglo-American in 2007, I spent a few years in research actually on an industry funded and initiated research project at Monash University in Melbourne on the fertility of magnetic nickel sulfide systems. So this is how I first got involved with Anglo-American and Anglo then made me an author and I joined them. Yeah, so you made that jump from academia to industry more or less? You could have picked either path. You could probably go back again. We know people who've done that. Yeah, absolutely. And you know that the great thing about my roles with Anglo of the years have been that I've always been involved in research. And that's a part of my job that I've really enjoyed. Very much working with students supervising them, generating ideas for new projects, directing the people. That's a part that I've enjoyed. And as you say, I imagine going back at some point in time. But for now, I'm very happy in the industry. Yeah, and I'm not sure broadly that people are aware how much of that happens, particularly in the larger companies. There are people like you who are helping to bring master students, PhD students through your projects and building relationships and learning things which can be useful to you as you move on. Yeah, there's a lot going on inside the companies. That's often not really publicized. So there's a lot of internal research going on that the public doesn't really know about. So why did you become a geochemist? So originally I'm from Germany, from Munich and Germany. And I guess chemistry, geology, was something I was always interested in already when I was going to school. And decided geology was just the more exciting bit rather than just standing in the lab. But I still have that passion for chemistry. And so this is how I initially got into isotope geochemistry and geochemistry. But my real passion was really always than the exploration and the project generation. So through the geochemistry, I got into the mining exploration industry and through that had the explosion. And so I ended up in my current role, which is more focused on the mineral system and the project generation aspect of it. Sort of the more holistic view of it. But I still have great passion for geochemistry, obviously. So the interest in this big multidisciplinary project amuses and the fact that they're bringing patologists and other researchers together that don't normally think about processes in economic geology, let alone for free copper deposits. And that has had its own benefits. But the third piece was industry's interest. And why is industry participating in this basic fundamental research? And you're not the only company involved. So it's not just unique to Anglo-American. So we were at the time when the first ideas of families were discussed that was around in the summer, Northern Hemisphere summer of 2016. And at that time already, we had for a number of years a collaboration with the Nature History Museum with Jamie Wilkinson. So Jamie had approached Anglo at the time and invited us to be an industry partner in the project. And I guess we were sort of really-- we welcomed that invitation. And we're really interested in participating for a number of reasons. Well, first of all, poor free copper deposits are one of our major economic interests to Anglo. So it's a copper production and also a large part of our exploration portfolio. And there's still a lot of fundamental aspects that we don't really fully understand about the poor free copper mineral systems. So I think this is why we were interested in a sort of a fundamental research project like that. And what was really interesting about families from far side was, and it's somewhat different from other collaborative projects we'd been involved in in the past, that families was really sort of a holistic assessment of the whole free mineral system. So from the mantle source to the site of copper deposition. So it wasn't really focusing on specific processes or aspects, but a real holistic assessment. And as you mentioned earlier, it was really what was also unique bringing together this multidisciplinary team of world class researchers. And from, like, igneous patrologists to numerical modelers, to walk-on-knowages, to economic geologists as well as geochemists. And I still remember the very first meeting I attended. And it was a very vibrant and inspiring atmosphere, I thought. And it was always, I think it was definitely a little bit like heard in cats because, as you said, people who had not been involved in any sort of economic geology research, who also didn't really understand the needs of industry at all, and had worked in their own little niches. But it was definitely a very, very inspiring environment to be in. So we clearly saw that as an opportunity to tackle those sort of fundamental questions around the poultry copper mineral system that we didn't really fully understand. So is understanding those fundamental aspects of poultry that we don't understand yet? Really going to help you find more copper? Well, maybe not that directly, but the way we look at it is always such as sort of two main aspects to research. And the one is obviously developing the tools and the workflows that we apply in day-to-day exploration. That's obviously more immediate. But on the other hand, it's also really the fundamental understanding that really improves our predictive capabilities. So at the end of the day, and my feeling is that this fundamental understanding and improving our predictive capabilities is getting more and more important as exploration and discovery of superior value or systems becomes increasingly challenging. So I think it is definitely something we need to pay more attention to, and then what we do. So you're participating, but you not only just showing up to the meetings, Anglo-American actually provided a data set to the project. So can you just speak briefly about why you would provide data to the researchers? I guess it was from the start. It was clear when we first were talking to Jamie Wilkins. The Famous Project was primarily NERC funded. So it was quite well funded. So it was a project that didn't seek financial support from industry, but definitely in kind support from industry, and also provision of study sites and so on. So it was clear to us from the start that we would need to bring something to the table. And so we decided to provide the Los Boncens District in the Myocene Belt of Central Chile as a study site to the project. So along with that, we obviously also provided some in-house geological information and geochemical data. But it was not so much the data set that we provided, but the district is a study site. So this is something we decided early on. And that was also, to some extent, also a requirement of the initial application that the consortium submitted to actually have a study site of that time. And we had, at the time, and over the years, we'd done quite a bit of exploration in the Los Boncens District. And through that, we collected several thousand lithogy chemical data over the years. And we had a pretty good understanding of the geological and metallogenic evolution of the district. So we knew that this would be a really good study site. So not only is it one of the most and now all three copper clusters in the world, but it's also, like, in the district, you've got 15 to 20 million year history of magnetic evolution that goes from the early switch from volcanic activity to intrusive activity. You then have the amalgamation of the San Francisco batholith over a period of several million years. You've got hydrotherm activity episodically throughout that period. And you then have the rapid switch to a fertile productive poultry system at around eight to nine million years. So then you had all of that going on in the one district, and we felt this would be really an excellent study site. And I guess we also understood from previous projects, we'd been involved in that the quality of the research outcome depends to large extent also on the quality of the study site. So we felt that we had a vested interest in providing a good site. So that was sort of our thinking there. And obviously we couldn't provide all of the data that we had to the project, but as I said, we provided some of the data and also a lot of our insights and our understanding of it. So we could really direct the famous team, the sampling towards sort of the really the critical stages in the evolution of the system. - That's key. I mean, that's years of work that accelerates what famus is doing. - Absolutely. - So there's two other things for me that in what you describe there that are, I think hugely important, one is the district scale, which we don't often look at. There's so many deposit scale studies. We don't see that whole evolution of clusters. And the second is the volume of data, which we also in academia don't see very often because who can take several thousand or multiple thousands of geochemical or hyperspect, whatever the data is, we don't see the volume. So those two things mean without knowing anything else, they're just a hugely valuable dataset. - Yeah. - Absolutely, absolutely. - Yeah. And I think if we could be making a pitch to the rest of the industry is the more of those data sets that are used in collaboration with our very bright, good researchers who through no follow their own, don't have these data sets. We might make some progress. - Absolutely. - Yeah, and it is really, like as you said, you can't stress it enough. It is looking at the district scale and volume of the day. This is really what unlocked so much in our understanding that when we did not really anticipate, so if you can't stress that enough, absolutely. - Thank you, Jimmy Wilkinson, Atlanta, Melacoba, and Christian Islandfeld. We're providing your insights into the magnetic processes that can lead to corporate deposits and how multidisciplinary collaborative research can advance our understanding to our listeners. Thanks for joining us. Next week, we'll explore the epithermal environment and its connection to deeper magnetic hydrothermal systems with guest Richard Cilito, John Thompson, Chris Muller from K92 and Dave Reese, it's gonna be great. I'm Ann Thompson, your host and producer. All the episodes are available at scgweb.org/podcast and most other places you get your podcasts. For information on new releases, be sure to follow the scg and ALS Gold Spot discoveries on their social media channels. This episode was produced by your host, with support from our production team, I shall Ahmed, Britblomel, Halle Kebel, and Sam Weatherly. Our theme music is Confluence by Eastwinds. You can check them out at eastwinds.bandcamp.com. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. Catch you next time.