Discriminating productive jasperoids associated with economic gold mineralization from barren jasperoids, those with no known gold association, has long been an objective of Great Basin explorationists. Holland et al. (1988) use factor analysis of a multielement geochemical data set to compare jasperoids associated with Carlin-type gold mineralization with jasperoids in barren systems. They go on to propose a genetic model for Carlin-type deposits based on their interpretation of the factor analysis results. There are problems with their approach, several of which the authors acknowledge. The geologic control for their samples is inadequate, the analytical technique used is inaccurate for several critical elements, and their statistical analysis of the data could be much simpler, easier to interpret, and useful.

This paper presents a detailed comparison of the microboudinage of piedmontite in two different mineralogical hosts, a quartz matrix, and albite porphyroblasts in a siliceous schist, with the aim of clarifying the rheological properties of albite in relation to those of quartz. Stress and strain analyses of the microboudinage confirm that the boudinage took place in the retrograde stage of metamorphism during decreasing temperature, and reveal that albite deformed at the same strain rate as quartz above the plastic-brittle transition temperature of albite.

A correlation exists between the quality of the rock record and the diversity of fossils recorded from that rock record but what drives that correlation, and how consistent that correlation is across different environments, remain to be determined. Palaeontologists wishing to investigate past diversity patterns need to first address issues of geological bias in their data.

We used samples from six Finnish ore deposits to evaluate the efficiency of sample pretreatment procedures — crushing, splitting and grinding — and to compare three analytical methods based on the atomic absorption determination of gold following: (1) classical lead fire assay (FA); (2) the aqua regia leach (AR) followed by Hg coprecipitation of Au; and (3) the sodium cyanide (NaCN) leach. Sample size used for the method comparison is 20 g. The Au deposits and ore types were: Suurikuusikko and Osikonma¨ki, refractory ores in which Au is associated with arsenopyrite and pyrite; Pampalo and Kutemaja¨rvi ores with metallic Au and Au tellurides; and Jokisivu and Pahtavaara ores containing coarse-grained metallic Au. After crushing, the samples were split into three parts, one of which was put aside into storage. Two splits were further divided into two subsamples which were ground to two grades of fineness (<0.03 and <0.06 mm). The four subsamples thus obtained were analysed for Au using the three analytical methods. Each determination was performed five times on each of the four subsamples. According to t-tests on the FA results of the two splits, crushing and splitting produced samples of equal Au content in all six cases. Grinding to a finer grain size gave a significant difference in Au results only for the Pahtavaara ore sample. If the FA results are assumed to represent 100% recovery of Au, we obtained greater than 95% recoveries for all but the Suurikuusikko sample (87% recovery) by the AR leach method. We also obtained recoveries of over 95% by the NaCN leach method for the Pampalo, Kutemaja¨rvi and Pahtavaara samples, whereas recoveries for the other three samples varied between 73 to 92%. The AR leach was also performed on 1-g samples and the NaCN leach on 250-g samples. For three of the ore samples, decreasing sample size from 20 g to 1 g did not cause a significant difference in the variance of the Au results. Increasing the sample size from 20 g to 250 g significantly improves the representativity of only the Pahtavaara sample. For the Kutemaja¨rvi, Pahtavaara and Jokisivu ores, a sample larger than 250 g is needed in order to obtain a precision equivalent to that for reference samples.