Металлогения Тихоокеанского Северо-Запада (Дальний Восток России): тектоника, магматизм и металлогения активных континентальных окраин. Путеводитель по полевым экскурсиям на Дальнем Востоке России: 1-20 сентября 2004 г.

This guidebook was prepared for the Interim IAGOD Conference on Metallogeny of the Pacific Northwest: Tectonics, Magmatism and Metallogeny of Active Continental Margins, which took place in September of 2004 in Vladivostok, the southernmost port of the Russian Far East. The book describes the geology of a number of important ore districts and deposits in the region. These are the major deposits of fluorine (Voznesenka), boron (Dalnegorsk), tungsten (Vostok-2), platinum (Konder), gold (Pokrovka), and some smaller deposits of tin, lead, zinc, and other metals.

Copper is the first metal which had really played a large part in human history. It is considered that Latin cuprus from which chemical name of copper originated was connected with the island of Cyprus, with the meaning ‘copper island’. But actually it is not so. The Greek word κύπρος has uncertain etymology. For copper the Greeks had a word ϗαλκός; the term “Chalcolithic” goes back to this word. Latin language had another word: aes. The combination aes cyprium meant “Cyprian copper”. Then cyprium was replaced by cuprum. All European words connected with it do not go back to a common Indo-European base. The Latin base is closer to them (Muhly 1973, p. 174, 175). <...>

Phase diagrams mean more to the metallurgist than mere graphical records of the physical states of matter. They provide a medium of expression and thought that simplifies and makes intelligible the otherwise bewildering pattern of change that takes place as elemental substances are mixed one with another and are heated or cooled, compressed or expanded. They illumine relationships that assist us in our endeavor to exercise control over the behavior of matter. These are no accidental by-products of a system devised primarily for the recording of physical data. They exist because the basic features of construction of all phase diagrams are dictated by a single natural law, the phase rule of J. Willard Gibbs, which relates the physical state of a mixture with the number of substances of which it is composed and with the environmental conditions imposed upon it. <...>

Our dependence on the minerals that underpin modern life has grown enormously over the last few decades. Figure 1.1 shows the price, the average grade and production of copper ore has changed dramatically from 1900 to the present. At the start of last century the price was 7000 US$ per ton (expressed in 1998 currency) to negate the effects of inflation; by 2002 it had decreased three-fold to about 1800 US $ per ton, then, in the three years to 2010 it rose sharply to about 9000 US$ per ton before declining again in the latest recession. Over the same period, the total amount of copper mined gradually increased, except in the early 20s and 30s when both price and production dropped. How do we explain these changes, and what do they tell us about how the metal is found and mined, and about how it is used by society? Understanding these concepts is the basis of economic geology <...>