MAGTVIATIC

MNCENTRATION
I hope you are not intending to
publish your conclusions; indeed I
cannot suppose this, as you kno*,
ho*, dangerous it is to work out
geological problems with three
thousand miles between you and the
region to be investigatecl.
J. D. Dana letter to
Sir Archibald Geikie, 1886
Certain accessory or uncommon constituents of
magmas may become concentrated into bodies of
sufficient size and richness to constitute valuable
mineral deposits. Some of these are large and rich;
some, such as chromite and platinum, are the sole
source of these minerals; many, however, are of
greater scientific than eommercial interest. Repre-
sentatives of magmatic concentration are many and
widespread, but there are relatively few types; their
mineralogy is simple, and the products yielded are
not numerous. Although individual deposits are of
great value, as a whole they are overshadowed in
importance by those resulting from other processes.
Magmatic ore deposits are characterized by their
close relationship with intermediate or deep-seated,
intrusive igneous rocks. Actually, they themselves
are igneous rocks whose composition happens to
be of particular value to man. They constitute either
the whole igneous mass or a part of it, or form
offset bodies. They are magmatic products that
crystallize from magmas. They are also termed
magmalic segregations, magmatic injections, or ig-
neous syngenetic deposits.
MODE OF FORMATION
Magmatic deposits result from simple crystalliza-
tion, or from concentration by differentiation, of
intrusive igneous gtasses. They were firmly estab-
lished by Vogt as one of the major types of mineral
deposits, at which time they were considered to be
simply an ore facies of igneous rock, formed by
earliest crystallization of the ore minerals. Subse-
quently, it was learned that in many of the deposits
the ore minerals actually crystrllized [ater than the
rock minerals, and for such deposits the former
simple concept had to be modified. [t is now real-
ized that there are several modes of formation of
magmatic deposits and that they originate during
different periods of magma crystallization. [n some,
ttre ore minerals crystallized early, in others late;
in still others they remained as immiscible liquids
until after crystallization of the host rock. Graton
and Mclaughlin proposed the term pneumotectic,
now abandoned, for deposits in which mineralizers
played a part and orthoteuic for the early straight
magmatic ones, which is the same as Niggli's term
orthomdgmatic.
In the formation of magmatic concentrations the
processes of differentiation discussed in Chapter 4
apply.
Much confusion exists in the literature on mag-
matic deposits, in part because of fuzzy terminol-
ogy. "Magmatic
segregation" has often been as-
sumed to be the only kind of magmatic deposit;
early and late magmatic too often have not been
distinguished. As a result, some authors have con-
sidered that certain deposits could not be magmatic
simply because they were not segregations or be-
cause ore minerals later than rock silicates pre-
cluded separation by crystallization. Unnecessary
conflict of interpretation arose and still exists.
Some of this confusion need not occur if it is
realized that there can be more than one period
of
magmatic ore formation within the magmatic period
and that there may be more than one process
of
differentiation by which magmatic deposits rnay re-
sult.
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