Porphyry Copper Provinces Richard H.

Sillitoe
SEG International Exchange Lecturer and Plenary Speaker

27 West Hill Park, Highgate Village, London N6 6ND, England

E-mail, aucu@compuserve.com

It has been recognized for the past century that copper deposits, in common with those of many other metals, are heterogeneously distributed in Earths upper crust, resulting in areally restricted copper provinces that were generated during several discrete metallogenic epochs over time intervals of up to several hundred million years. Porphyry and any associated skarn deposits dominate many of these provinces and account for approximately 70% of the global copper inventory. Although porphyry copper deposits and/or prospects occur in most volcanoplutonic arc terranes, comparably sized arc segments have total contained copper contents that differ by more than two orders of magnitude. A variety of deposit-scale geometric and geologic features and factors strongly influence the size and/or grade of porphyry copper deposits and districts. These include the presence of clustered alteration-mineralization centers, mafic or massive carbonate host rocks, voluminous magmatic-hydrothermal breccias, bornite digenite-bearing core zones, hypogene and supergene enrichment, and mineralized skarn development, coupled with lack of serious dilution by late, low-grade porphyry intrusions and breccias. Furthermore, copper endowment undoubtedly benefits from optimization of all aspects of the ore-forming process. Tectonic setting also plays an important role in copper metallogeny. Compressional tectonomagmatic belts, commonly created by flat-slab subduction or arc-continent collision and characterized by crustal thickening and high rates of uplift and exhumation, appear to host most large, high-grade hypogene porphyry copper deposits. Such mature arcs, characterized by large-volume felsic magma chambers, must also undergo mafic magma input during porphyry copper formation. Tectonically influenced differences in exhumation rate also affect observed copper endowment, which is greatest in youthful arc terranes. Notwithstanding the obvious importance of these deposit-scale geologic, regional tectonic, and erosion rate criteria for effective copper deposit formation and preservation, they seem inadequate, even collectively, to explain the localization of premier porphyry copper provinces, such as the central Andes and southwestern North America, and, by the same token, the paucity of appreciable copper mineralization in some apparently similar tectonomagmatic settings elsewhere. It is proposed here that premier porphyry copper provinces occur where restricted segments of the lithosphere were predisposed to upper crustal copper concentration throughout long intervals of Earth history. This predisposition was most likely gained during oxidation and copper introduction by subduction-derived fluids, containing metals and volatiles extracted from hydrated basalts and sediments in down-going slabs. As a result, the suprajacent lithospheric mantle and underplated lower crust may have been metasomatized and become fertile for tapping during subsequent subduction- or postsubduction-related magmatic events to generate porphyry copper districts or belts. The fertile lithosphere beneath some magmatic arc terranes was incorporated during earlier collisional tectonism, commonly during Precambrian times. Translithospheric fault zones, including ancient collisional sutures, commonly play a key role in localizing major copper deposits, districts, and belts. These proposals address the long-debated concept of metal inheritance in terms of 1

the fundamental role played by subduction-metasomatized mantle lithosphere in global copper metallogeny.