Zackly how many miles do you think you have to drive from Thunder Bay to the Stillwater mine? Minnesota is not far from TBay. And the Mafics of the Stillwater complex exist on just inside the CDN side notably in Pardee and continue both ways between the two locations.
Also analogously the Kimberlites of Michigan, showing on the surface continue through to Sault Ste Marie, Canada and up through Agawa and into Wawa in a broad belt. It is the same sort of scale.
You can be down in a mine in Val D'or and looking at a vein. I can then blind fold you, turn you around (I am sure that would not be too hard) and take you by airplane to Snow Lake Manitoba, take you down in a gold mine and make you look up at the gold vein again. You would not know you had left. Same rocks, andesite, phonolite, trachyte, pillow lava, tuff S and P diorite, same vein structure and size, same accessory mineralization, same occurrence of gold in vein edge pyrite, same alteration biotite mica etc, same grade, same age. Maybe even same Island Arc chain and water depth. Now that is significant separation geograpchically for humans but it may not be that big a deal in geology.
Gold veins are not all that alike from mine to mine. But these similarities do exist. (And same mineral province.)
Your Stillwater-TBay Lac Des Isles separation (about 90 miles) and the River Valley Sudbury, Wanapatei, Temagami, East Bull Lake separation are not significant distances geologically necessarily. What is more significant are time, grade, metamorphism, setting and mineral content of the intrusive.
EC<:-} |
