Suitability of surficial media for Ni–Cu–PGE exploration in an established mining camp: a case study from the South Range of the Sudbury Igneous Complex, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A geochemical study over the southwestern part of the South Range of the Sudbury Igneous Complex was completed to assess the suitability of surficial media (humus, B-horizon soil and C-horizon soil) for delineating geochemical anomalies associated with Ni–Cu–PGE (platinum group element) mineralization. Another objective was to test whether Na pyrophosphate can eliminate the effects of anthropogenic contamination in humus. Results of this study suggest that the natural geochemical signature of humus is strongly overprinted by anthropogenic contamination. Despite no indication of underlying or nearby mineralization, metal concentrations in humus samples by aqua regia collected downwind from smelting operations are higher compared to background, including up to 13 times higher for Pt, 12 times higher for Cu and nine times higher for Ni. The high anthropogenic background masks the geogenic signal such that it is only apparent in humus samples collected in the vicinity of known Ni–Cu–PGE deposits. Results of this study also demonstrate that anthropogenically derived atmospheric fallout also influences the upper B-horizon soil; however, lower B-horizon soil (at >20 cm depth) and C-horizon soil (both developed in till) are not affected. Glacial dispersal from Ni–Cu–PGE mineralization is apparent in C-horizon till samples analysed in this study. Compared to the background concentrations, the unaffected C-horizon till samples collected immediately down-ice of the low-sulfide, high precious metal Vermilion Cu–Ni–PGE deposit are enriched over 20 times in Pt (203 ppb), Au (81 ppm) and Cu (963 ppm), and over 30 times in Ni (1283 ppm). Supplementary material: supplementary tables and figures are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5691080
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".