The South Island of New Zealand has had a long history of mining of orogenic gold deposits and the placer deposits that have accumulated from erosion of those deposits (Williams 1974). Research over the past decade has provided some new insights and understanding of the processes of formation of the orogenic deposits, and this new research provides a context for on-going exploration activity. This paper outlines some of the general findings of the research effort and provides some indicators for specific features of the orogenic deposit formation that are worthy of including in an exploration strategy.
South Island orogenic deposits formed in greenschist facies metasedimentary terranes that were deformed and metamorphosed during collisional orogenesis on the Pacific margin of Gondwana (Fig. 1). The orogenic deposits formed at a wide range of times between early Paleozoic and late Cenozoic, in orogenic belts that were progressively added to the Gondwana margin, so that there are many similarities and correlations between the geology of the South island and that of Eastern Australia from which New Zealand rifted in the Cretaceous.
CITATION: Craw, D, 2019. Orogenic deposits: new approaches to old goldfields in New Zealand, in Proceedings PACRIM 2019, pp 1420 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).