Abstract
Concentration and accumulation of metals that successfully terminate with formation of an economic mineral deposit range from an instantaneous, single-stage process to a prolonged, multistage history of gradual metal addition, reconstitution and modification. The opposite, metal dispersion (Holland and Petersen, 1981), is also at work and this can take place anywhere during the ore formation history and disperse (dissipate) a promising metal enrichment or an orebody already made. The most obvious and destructive case of ore dispersal is erosion of earlier deposits. Mining, equivalent to anthropogenic erosion and denudation, is a particularly rapid and efficient process of orebody removal and dispersion, although much lower quality “remnant deposits” like dumps of low grade material, tailings or slag heaps are sometimes generated by this process, and are left for future generations (Chapter 13).
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Laznicka, P. (2010). Giant deposits in geological context. In: Giant Metallic Deposits. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12405-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12405-1_15
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