“Gold in Turkey — A missing link in Tethyan metallogeny” [Ore Geology Reviews 28, 147–179] — Reply

Abstract

In his discussion of Yigit (2006), Kuscu comments mainly on the petrology of the magmatic rocks in Turkey, with some lesser emphasis on porphyry, IOCG and skarn deposits. Although Kuscu does not present much supplementary data to improve understanding of the gold metallogeny of Turkey, I accept the comments in a constructive spirit and welcome this opportunity to reply. First of all, the original manuscript of Yigit (2006) was written in 2003 and submitted for publication in early 2004. Therefore, many of the references cited in the discussion postdate the original paper. Furthermore, many of the papers cited are abstracts, symposia paper, proceedings, short papers and even websites; these unfortunately rarely contain sufficient hard data to support the ideas presented. Most of the conclusions in these papers are drawn from published literature on the subject, rather than prospector regional-scale original studies with hard original data. Kuscu also mentions unpublished Turkish Geological Survey (MTA) reports. Most, if not all, of these reports on gold deposits are classified and therefore are not publicly accessible as claimed. Kuscu highlights the debatable and complicated nature of the Tethyan evolution of Turkey. However, Yigit (2006) does not make any attempt to solve this contentious issue, since the purpose of the paper was rather to present current understanding of gold metallogeny of Turkey in the Tethyan realm. Kuscu states that there is no “missing link in Tethyan metallogeny”. While studies