Tips for gold seekers in China (December 25, 2007)

China’s mining history may stretch back 3,000 years, but when it comes to gold, the country has yet to find many world-class gold deposits.

Gold mining is fractured and typically undercapitalized and dominated by artisanal workers or small collectively-owned mines that are often operating illegally.

But that doesn’t mean China won’t find significant gold deposits in the future.

Richard Goldfarb has been studying geology and the genesis of gold deposits for more than 20 years and has been working on various projects in China since 1996.

The president of the Society of Economic Geologists and a research geologist in the minerals team of the U.S. Geological Geological Survey, Goldfarb argues that half of the country is made up of Precambrian cratons with an abundance of Paleoproterozoic and Late Archean rocks, which are very favourable for gold elsewhere in the world.

“There likely are some Precambrian gold deposits in China and these could be giants,” he says in an email to the The Northern Miner.

Goldfarb explains that while we currently know of no such Precambrian gold deposits, they might exist because most of the Paleoproterozoic and Archean rocks are of very high metamorphic grade and any large gold resources in these could be relatively hard to discover.

By that he means many of the easy-to-find vein deposits that would normally be in greenschist facies rocks would be eroded away, while more disseminated-type, and stockwork-type, gold deposits, which reflect higher temperature equivalents of the vein deposits in greenschist rocks, could still be present in the high-grade rocks.

The alteration associated with these would be calc-silicates, and perhaps would be best described as ‘skarn-like’, such as in the Southern Cross area of the Yilgarn craton, although they are not true skarns, he explains.

“Deposits such as Kolar and Hemlo occur in high-grade metamorphic rocks so it’s difficult to believe we won’t discover large Precambrian gold deposits also in high-grade rocks in China,” he adds.

In addition, if one looks at a map of Central Asia from Kazakhstan to Eastern Kyrgyzstan there are many huge gold vein deposits in the Altaid greenschist belts and Goldfarb argues that we almost certainly will see those deposits continue into China.

“We can go from the low Tian Shan in Uzbekistan (i.e. Muruntau) to the high Tian Shan in Kyrgyzstan (i.e. Kumtor) and then see these same Paleozoic rocks and faults continue into the high and remote Tian Shan in Xinjiang,” he explains.

His advice for gold miners? “I’d look in any metamorphic belts in Paleozoic mountain ranges, any remaining greenschist belts in Precambrian cratons, and then in amphibolite facies rocks in the same cratons for anything termed ‘skarn’ by the Chinese geologists.”