NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Dehcho Region

Tags: geology, geochemistry, lead, zinc, germanium, Structural geology

Objective(s): This research project will investigate the geological processes that formed the Prairie Creek zinc-lead-silver(-germanium) deposit and try to better understand the environment of the ancient ocean where the rocks originally formed, the mountain-building processes that later deformed those rocks, and the nature of metal-bearing fluids that moved through the rocks.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No. 5922. This research project will investigate the geological processes that formed the Prairie Creek zinc-lead-silver(-germanium) deposit. The goal is to better understand the environment of the ancient ocean where the rocks originally formed, the mountain-building processes that later deformed those rocks, and the nature of metal-bearing fluids that moved through the rocks. It is likely that a combination of all these factors contributed to the formation Prairie Creek deposit. A particular focus will be to determine how much of the critical metal germanium is present, where it occurs, and what geological processes controlled its concentration at Prairie Creek. The team will spend about 2 weeks at Prairie Creek looking at rocks, taking photographs of them, and writing detailed descriptions of the textures and minerals seen in them. The rocks looked at will include some that are exposed naturally on the Earth’s surface around the mine site and others that were drilled out from underground by NorZinc during past exploration work. The sites visited around the mine site will be accessed by walking or driving on existing roads. The research team will collect a few buckets of rock samples to bring back to the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, the University of Toronto, and Saint Mary’s University. For the rocks that brought back from Prairie Creek, microscopes will be used to look at them more closely and do some different types of laboratory analyses on them. Most of the laboratory work for this project will be done at the University of Toronto and Saint Mary’s University, but some may be done at specialized laboratories at other universities, government organizations, or commercial companies. The type of laboratory work will depend somewhat on the minerals and textures we see in the rocks this summer but could include, for example, using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry to measure how much of the element germanium is present in the samples and map out where it occurs. Two students will be involved in this project. Although it is unknown yet who the students will be, one will be a graduate student at the University of Toronto and the other will be an undergraduate student at Saint Mary’s University. With the guidance and support from the more experienced scientists on the project, the students will do much of the work documenting and analyzing the rock samples and then presenting the results in reports and presentations. Results of this research project will be presented at the Yellowknife Geoscience Forum. The maps and reports generated from this program will be publicly available on the Northwest Territories Geological Survey’s website. Presentations and copies of maps and reports can be made for the community upon request. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from: June 15 - June 30, 2024