Formation and Preservation of Brucite and Awaruite in Serpentinized and Tectonized Mantle in Central British Columbia: Implications for Carbon Mineralization and Nickel Mining
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The serpentinized and tectonized mantle in the Decar area in central British Columbia, including rocks that host the Baptiste Ni Deposit, consists of several ultramafic protolith lithologies that were variably altered to serpentinite, ophicarbonate, soapstone and listvenite. Alteration minerals include brucite (Mg[OH]2), which can be used to sequester atmospheric CO2 and awaruite (Ni3Fe), which is an economically attractive nickel alloy. This study examines the formation and preservation of brucite (up to 13 wt%) and awaruite (up to 0.12 wt%) in the Decar area and demonstrates that both minerals are formed during serpentinization and destroyed during carbonate alteration of mantle rocks. We distinguish five alteration stages that occurred primarily in a continental environment: (1) low-temperature lizardite serpentinization from meteoric fluids at <300°C, (2) high-temperature antigorite (±metamorphic olivine) serpentinization from metamorphic fluids at >300°C, (3) carbonate alteration, (4) chrysotile veining (±antigorite) serpentinization, and (5) later carbonate alteration from crustal fluids. Brucite formed primarily during late lizardite serpentinization and is most abundant in rocks that originally had high olivine–pyroxene ratios. Awaruite formed during both late lizardite serpentinization and during antigorite serpentinization and is most abundant in serpentinized olivine-rich harzburgite. The stability and abundance of brucite and awaruite are controlled by both the host rock composition and degree of serpentinization. The coexistence of brucite and awaruite reflects formation in serpentinized olivine-rich peridotite and creates an opportunity for carbon-neutral nickel mining.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".