Grant: Alliance Grants

Canada is a global leader in contributing critical minerals and metals to a resource hungry world. The generational transition to a low carbon economy is enormous and Canada's mineral endowment can be a major contributor, particularly for copper, which is in increasing demand for our electrified future. Here, the discovery and development of new resources can have by far the greatest impact-well beyond improvements to processing and recycling, though the latter remain important. There are enormous challenges, however, in the future discovery of new copper resources throughout Canada. Numerous mineral deposits that contain copper remain undiscovered as they are covered by forests and buried beneath overburden such as soils, glacial materials, and permafrost. These copper resources mostly occur as porphyry copper-type deposits throughout the Canadian Cordillera (BC & Yukon), but are concealed by 10s of metres of overburden. Innovative, multi-disciplinary exploration strategies and tools that more effectively and efficiently detect and delineate buried copper mineralization are required. Microbes in soils above such mineralization provide exciting new opportunities that leverage geomicrobiological knowledge and advances in DNA sequencing technologies. Geomicrobiological techniques for the exploration and discovery of buried mineral resources are emerging with strong potential as "through-cover" mineral exploration techniques. Our previous research established that microbial communities from soils can detect buried diamondiferous kimberlites and porphyry copper mineralization. The uptake of this technique by the mineral exploration industry will depend upon the creation of soil microbial community databases of both mineral-associated and background soil microbial communities. Therefore, we propose to fingerprint the soil microbial communities above known porphyry copper deposits and in a range of ecosystem-based representative background soils from areas of strong porphyry-copper mineral potential. Furthermore, we will transform this data into tools that can be utilized by the mineral exploration industry to increase critical mineral discovery in Canada.