The Teena Zn-Pb Deposit (McArthur Basin, Australia). Part II: Carbonate Replacement Sulfide Mineralization During Burial Diagenesis—Implications for Mineral Exploration

摘要

The Teena Zn-Pb deposit is located in the Carpentaria Zn Province (Australia), which contains some of the largest clastic dominant (CD-type) massive sulfide Zn-Pb deposits in the world. The timing of the main stage of hydrothermal sulfide mineralization in the Teena subbasin is constrained to the midstage of burial diagenesis, during a period of short-lived regional extension. To distinguish hydrothermal alteration from spatially and temporally overlapping burial diagenetic alteration, and to establish the primary controls on hydrothermal mass transfer, it is necessary to evaluate the various foot- and hanging-wall alteration assemblages that formed between early- (eogenesis) and late- (mesogenesis) stage diagenesis. To achieve this, we have statistically evaluated a large lithogeochemistry dataset (n >2,500) and selected a subset (n = 65) of representative samples for detailed mineralogical (X-ray diffraction, illite crystallinity) and petrographic (scanning electron microscopy) analyses; hyperspectral core imaging data were then used to upscale key paragenetic observations.