Abstract
The Yulong copper belt, along part of the Red River-Ailao Shan fault system and its northwestern extension in eastern Tibet, consists of five porphyry pipes that contain a total copper resource of over 8 million tons. The porphyries are characterized by high alkali content (K2O+Na2O>6%), K2O/Na2O>1, and marked negative Ti, Ta and Nb anomalies on mantle-normalized incompatible element diagrams. U-Th-Pb laser ICP-MS dating of zircons from the Yulong porphyries showed that they were emplaced over a 4.3 Ma period and that they young systematically from northwest to southeast as follows: Yulong, 41.2±0.2Ma; Zalaga, 38.5±0.2Ma; Mangzong, 37.6±0 Ma; Duoxiasongduo, 37.5±0.2Ma; and Malasongduo, 36.9±0.4 Ma. We suggest that the source of the shoshonites was lower crust that was pushed into the mantle by the compressive component of transpressional movement on the adjacent Tuoba-Mangkang fault and that the compositional variation in the porphyries is due to mixing between magmas of different composition, generated by different degrees of partial melting of a heterogeneous source region.
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Liang, H., Zhang, Y., Xie, Y., Lin, W., Campbell, I.H., Yu, H. (2005). Geochronological and geochemical study on the Yulong porphyry copper ore belt in eastern Tibet, China. In: Mineral Deposit Research: Meeting the Global Challenge. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-27946-6_315
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-27946-6_315
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