Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The development of industrialized societies requires the use of resources that have to be mined. Among those resources are several important metals (e.g. Cu, Ni, Pd, Pt) that, at present, can only be extracted from deposits formed by cooling of magmas (orthomagmatic deposits) or by interaction of magmas with aqueous fluids (magmatic-hydrothermal deposits). As demands of these metals grow due to the requirements of developed and developing countries and supply diminishes by the progressive exhaustion of known resources, the need to find new deposits for these metals increases. Successful, efficient exploration for these resources and their efficient exploitation relies on our understanding of how such deposits form. Because these resources are limited, every new discovery requires stronger efforts and a better understanding of where mineralization occurs, how these deposits are formed and what controls the spatial distribution of the metals of interests within a particular district. My research is aimed at understanding the geochemical mechanisms that favour the transfer of metals of interest from the Earth's mantle to the crust and the mechanism that control the precipitation of these metals in the anomalous concentrations required for their extraction to be economically feasible. In addition, my research also aims to understand how subsequent thermal events may further remobilize metals and affect the distribution of these metals in their current environments. The goal is to integrate the results of my work with the broader research work on ore deposit genesis to generate models that better predict how and where these deposits can be found in order to optimize exploration and exploitation of these non-renewable resources.