Advancing gold mineralization detection in northern New Brunswick through portable X-ray and micro-X-ray fluorescence spectrometry with multivariate compositional data analysis and clustering for pathfinder elements and alteration analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The New Brunswick segment of the Canadian Appalachians contains a variety of gold deposits and occurrences that formed at different stages of the Appalachian orogeny. The Tobique–Chaleur Zone, situated in the northern part of New Brunswick, hosts several orogenic and epithermal gold mineralization systems that are spatially related to large-scale crustal faults or their subsidiary splays, such as the Rocky Brook–Millstream Fault. Although gold mineralization in northern New Brunswick is hosted by auriferous quartz veins, finding pathfinder elements, indicator minerals and alteration associated with gold mineralization remains challenging. Herein, the portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF; Olympus Vanta™) spectrometer, in conjunction with micro-X-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF) energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), was applied to selected core intervals from four gold systems in the region: the Williams Brook, McIntyre Brook, Mulligan Gulch and Simpson Field occurrences. We generated p-XRF-based multi-element datasets from selected intervals, then applied compositional data analysis, including principal component analysis (biplots) and cluster analysis, to interpret them. Although the p-XRF analysis and subsequent multivariate compositional data analysis provide geochemical patterns and highlight indicator elements associated with gold mineralization, the study also includes a comprehensive mineralogical analysis. The p-XRF geochemical data help the interpretation of the mineralogy, but the explicit mineralogical composition is confirmed through detailed petrographic and <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -XRF analyses. Gold-bearing minerals were further identified by µ-XRF–EDS analysis, revealing that gold is mainly associated with sulfide minerals, namely pyrite, chalcopyrite, pyrrhotite, stibnite and arsenopyrite. In addition to the above, our mineralogical studies further indicate that fine-grained muscovite and illite, produced by potassic and silicification alteration styles, are associated with gold-bearing quartz veins.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".