Geology of the Giant Sudbury Polymetallic Mining Camp, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

A new, 1:100,000 scale compilation bedrock geology map provided with this issue presents a geologic synthesis of Canada’s most prolific mining camp, the world-class Sudbury structure with total past production and current reserves of over 1.7 billion tonnes of Ni, Cu, Co, Pt, Pd, Au, Ag ore (Lydon, 2007). The polymetallic ore is hosted within one of Earth’s largest preserved impact craters. The new map of the Ni-Cu-PGE Sudbury district (after Ames et al., 2005) is included in a pocket at the back of this issue (Map 1) and is linked to mineral deposit-commodity and geochronology data in Tables 1⇓ and 2⇓ of this paper. View this table: Table 1. List of Mineral Deposits and Occurrences of the Sudbury Map Area (Map 1) View this table: Table 2. U-Pb Isotope Data Across the Map Area Since 1891, six compilation maps of the geology of Sudbury have been published (Bell, 1891; Collins, 1937; Cooke, 1946; Card, 1969; Dressler, 1984; Ames et al., 2005) (Fig. 1⇓). Some of the Ni-Cu-PGE mines have operated for over a century, whereas new ore deposits, discovered as recently as 2004, are already in production or are in the process of being developed (i.e., advanced prospects). In the last 15 years, Sudbury has been the training ground for ~60 postgraduate geoscience students in North America (Fig. 1⇓). From 1903 to 1990, only 23 graduate theses were completed on Sudbury-related topics; eight of them in the 1970s, after the discovery of shatter cones (Dietz, 1964). Fig. 1. Number of graduate theses of North American geoscientists trained on Sudbury geology per decade, showing the minor peak in training after the discovery of shatter cones and the recent “education boom,” with over 50 geoscience graduate theses completed since 1990. The dashed lines represent the regional geologic maps of the Sudbury area …