Geology Seminar Series - Dr. Pilar Lecumberri-Sanchez - Ancient roots of tungsten in Western North America

Abstract: The tungsten cycle over Earth’s history has been affected by supercontinent assembly and breakup, the evolution of early life, and crustal melting and differentiation. In addition, tungsten is a key strategic mineral for modern society with no current substitutes and with over ninety percent of production from only three countries worldwide. Therefore, determining how/if current tungsten distribution relates to paleogeography, the evolution of early life, and source rock characteristics is of high scientific and economic interest.
Tungsten deposits are typically related to reduced magmatism in orogenic to post-orogenic settings. In the North American Cordillera, which preserves over three billion years of geologic record in a paleocontinental margin with abundant crustal magmatism, large tungsten resources are limited to the narrow Canadian Tungsten Belt in northwestern Canada. In this talk I will discuss the factors that control tungsten mineralization from a paleogeographic and geochemical perspective with a specific focus in western North America.