Geology and geochemical patterns of the Birimian gold deposits, Ghana, West Africa

A major gold province of the world exists in the Proterozoic Birimian and Tarkwaian supracrustal rocks of West Africa. The bulk of the gold comes from the primary lode occurrences of the Birimian rocks of Ghana (formerly The Gold Coast). Birimian lithofacies is characterised by subaqueous fine-grained sediments with bimodal volcanic material. Metasedimentary rocks include phyllites and metawackes. Metavolcanic rocks are predominantly tholeiitic basalts. Komatiites and banded iron formations (BIF) are absent.Gold is in 5 parallel, evenly spaced, more than 300 km long, northeast-trending volcanic belts separated by basins containing pyroclastic and meta-sedimentary units. The most prominent is the Ashanti volcanic “greenstone” belt, which hosts the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation mines at Obuasi (more than 800,000 kg Au since 1896), the Billiton Bogosu Gold mine at Bogosu, and the State Gold Mining Corporation mines at Prestea, Bibiani and Konongo.Gold, ranging from 2 to 30 ppm, is in quartz veins of laterally extensive major orebodies which deeply penetrate fissures and shear zones at contacts between metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks. The veins consists mainly of quartz with carbonate minerals, green sericite, carbonaceous partings and metallic sulfides and arsenides of Fe, As, Zn, Au, Cu, Sb, and Pb. Gold occurs in carbonate fillings in fractured quartz veins. Country rocks, which contain rutile, anatase and granular masses of leucoxene, along ore channels, have been hydrothermally altered to carbonates, sericite, silica and sulfide minerals. Fluid inclusion evidences suggest that mineral deposition took place at about 350°C and 140 bar from dilute aqueous solutions. Timing deduced from ore textures, however, show complex multi-stage mineralization events, with higher temperature minerals commonly having formed later than lower temperature ones. Geochemical studies of materials produced by tropical processes, especially soils, are essential in prospecting poorly exposed terranes of west Africa. Trace and major element distributions at mines and mineral occurrences can indicate mineralization otherwise difficult to detect.This paper highlights the features of the Ghanaian gold deposits that may aid the current search for new deposits along the gold belts. Exploration based on geochemistry is highly important, but should be integrated with data from accompanying geological, lithologic, mineralogical, and structural studies.