Hackaday has a long-running series on Mining and Refining, that tracks elements of interest on the human-made road from rocks to riches. What author Dan Maloney doesn’t address in that series is the natural history that comes before the mine. You can’t just plunk down a copper mine or start squeezing oil from any old stone, after all: first, you need ore. Ore has to come from somewhere. In this series, we’re going to get down and dirty into the geology of ore-forming processes to find out from wither come the rocks that hold our elements of interest.

What’s In an Ore?

Though we’re going to be talking about Planetary Science in this series, we should recognize the irony that “ore” is a word without any real scientific meaning. What distinguishes ore from other rock is its utility to human industry: it has elements or compounds, like gems, that we want, and that we think we can get out economically. That changes over time, and one generation’s “rock” can be another generation’s “ore deposits”. For example, these days prospectors are chasing copper in porphyry deposits at concentrations as low as 1000 ppm (0.1%) that simply were not economic in previous decades. The difference? Improvements in mining and refining, as well as a rise in the price of copper. Continue reading “Ore Formation: Introduction And Magmatic Processes” →