The Mineral Wealth of the Tethyan Volcanic Belts

摘要

In the Mesozoic, the Paleo-Ocean Tethys was located between the southern continental outskirts of Eurasia on one side and the Afro-Arabian and Indian plates on the other (Fig. 1). The literature began to use the term Tethys, introduced by the Austrian encyclopedic geologist E. Suess, in the late 19th century. The Tethyan volcanic belts have been known for their mineral wealth since the 6th millennium BC. The reserves of the famous Golden Quadrilateral in Romania (Baia de Aries, Brad, Sakaremb, and Zlatna), which have been exploited since that time, persist. The Romans alone mined about 150 t of gold there [1]. In addition, within the Tethyan area, numerous world-class deposits of the porphyry-cooper and pyrite-polymetallic types, accompanied by skarn and veined epithermal polymetallic and gold-silver satellites, have been discovered. These deposits ensure the extraction of more than 300000 t of copper and 50 t of gold in the European part of the Tethys. Only recently, two large gold deposits were discovered on the territory of Turkey-Copler and Oksut. In the Asian part of the Tethys, more than twenty large gold-bearing and porphyry-copper fields were discovered in Iran and Pakistan and on the Tibetan Plateau in Western China in the second half of the 20th century.