Recent Ph.D. graduate in Geosciences, Dr. Isabel Barton, is now a research scientist in the Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources. Her dissertation work focused on the Fungurume copper/cobalt deposits in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which produce 40 percent of the world’s cobalt – yet these deposits in the Central African Copperbelt have been little studied and remain poorly understood.
Even the most basic geologic questions – how the ores formed, what factors govern their distribution, how they have changed geologically in the millions of years since their formation – have never been precisely answered.
Dr. Isabel Barton made trips to the D.R. Congo each summer. She studied a group of these deposits, hosted in 800-million-year-old sedimentary rocks.
The Fungurume deposits are complex. Barton distinguished multiple generations of ore minerals, all precipitated at different times and corresponding to different changes in the mineralogy of the host rock. By a combination of petrographic and mineralogical studies, she outlined the deposits’ history and shown how they determine the spatial distribution of each generation of ore minerals.
Today her research is more extensive and focuses on different deposits in the same district. She’s begun field mapping, assessment of ore mineralogy and sampling on site. By analyzing the types of minerals present and the spatial changes in their proportions and chemical compositions, she hopes to determine how they formed and have changed since – and from there, to interpret what processes created the deposits.
This will enable her to construct a model for ore formation and alteration applicable not only to Fungurume but also to thousands of other sediment-hosted deposits in the Central African Copperbelt. Her research is helping fill a void in the geological understanding Next Generation of these ore deposits.