Lecture Review: Gold, Silver, and Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide Deposits

Vocabulary flashcards covering primary and secondary gold deposits, historical silver mining innovations, byproduct extraction, and volcanogenic massive sulfide systems directly from the lecture transcript.

Plasma gold

A secondary deposit formed through surficial ore-forming processes where accumulated gold is deposited secondarily after being eroded and transported from a primary deposit.

Secondary deposit

An ore deposit where mining extracts minerals from a secondary location where they accumulated, rather than from the original rocks in which they formed.

Primary deposit

The original rock deposit (such as a low gold deposit) that undergoes weathering and physical breakdown into smaller pieces.

Square step timbering

A mining innovation developed and used during historical silver mining in Nevada.

Byproduct

A secondary metal extracted from an ore deposit where it is not the main target, such as silver mined from a lead-zinc target mine.

Tetrahedrite

A mineral cited as an example of a sulfide compound involved in silver and base metal mining.

Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide (BMS)

An ore deposit type associated with volcanic activity where hydrothermal fluids concentrate multiple metals including lead, zinc, copper, gold, and silver into massive sulfide rocks.

Massive (in BMS deposits)

A descriptive term in deposit geology meaning that all or most of the host rock consists of sulfide minerals.

Sulfide minerals

A mineral class composed of sulfur combined with metals, characterized by chemical formulas that end in $S$ (with or without a trailing subscript number).