News and Ongoing

Matt Grimshaw  has secured a NERC CASE award studentship. Matt will work on a project sponsored by Klondike Gold Corporation which aims to use information from placer gold grains to interpret the nature the atypical small, rich hydrothermal gold system which was the source of the spectacularly rich placers of Eldorado and Bonanza Creeks, Yukon. Previous work on the Lone Star Deposit (Chapman et al. 2010 Economic Geology) suggested that the placer gold was derived from a spatially zoned system in which the systematic change of gold particle mineralogy reflected both spatial and temporal evolution of the hydrothermal system. Matt’s work will develop this hypothesis by correlating gold grains derived from different aged gravels within the placer systems to their original specific source locations. This approach has been made possible by discoveries made during Rob Lowther’s study of the White Channel Gravels (WCG) of the Klondike District. Rob and his co-supervisor (Jeff Peakall) discovered a persistent sedimentary horizon within the WCG which allows identification of gold liberated before or after this event. By selectively sampling different sedimentary units Matt will be able to generate a record of the compositions of gold liberated at different times- which can be correlated to vertical variation in gold mineralogy at specific locations. This project will also utilize the gold morphology- travelling distance correlation developed at UBC Vancouver by Evan Crawford and Jim Mortensen. These distance to source values can be integrated into the study to constrain the point of liberation of the gold.

The overall aim is to recreate the geometry of the zoned system within the eroded landscape and to learn more of the nature of the Lone Star hydrothermal system to inform exploration in that area and elsewhere.

Matt has spent the summer in the Klondike familiarizing himself with the study area before his official start date. PMG would like to thank both Klondike Gold Corporation and Jim Mortensen of UBC for their help at this early stage of the project.