Schist-hosted high-grade iron ore at the Sunrise Iron Mine, WY

The Sunrise Iron Mine is perhaps the most important iron ore deposit west of the Mississippi. With its earliest workings occurring as long as 10,000+ years ago, humans have been exploiting iron ore at Sunrise for generations. Unlike most conventional high-grade iron ore deposits, the ore itself at Sunrise is hosted in ferruginous schist as opposed to banded iron formation. Field, structural, petrologic, and geochemical investigations suggest a complex story of iron leaching, mobility, and mineralization. My goals for this project are to constrain the mechanisms of iron enrichment to better understand the hydrothermal iron system, which remains contentious. 

Establishing PGE Mineralization Vectors with Big Data

Big data studies offer unique insight into continental-scale geochemical and tectonic processes. Given their status as critical elements as well as their value and difficulty to routinely explore for, it would be worthwhile to understand the geochemical processes governing the enrichment and mineralization of platinum-group elements (PGE). The USGS database contains over 40,000 samples with known PGE concentrations. My goal for this project is to use statistics and perhaps even spatial analysis to establish robust PGE exploration pathfinders and to predict where possible deposits may be.