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The following diagrams illustrate the method: Les cartes ou les planches trop grandes pour dtre reproduites en un seul cliche sont filmdes d partir de Tangle supdrieure gauche, de gauche d droite et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n^cessaire. Le diagramme suivant illustre la mdthode : 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 ■ J v BULLETIN OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA Vol. 2, pp. 125-140. THE NICKEL AND COPPER DEPOSITS OF SUDBURY DISTRICT, CANxVDA HY UOBEUT BELL, B. A. SC, ^l. D., LL. D. ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE UEOLOGK'AI. SURVEY OF CANADA With an Appendix on THE SILICIFIED GLASS-BRECCIA OF VERMILION RIVER, SUDBURY DISTRICT uv GEORGE H. WILLIAMS ROCHESTER PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY Fkhruary, 1891 ) BULLETIN OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA Vol. 2, pp. 125-140 February 5, I89i THE NICKEL AND COPPER DEPOSITS OF SUDBURY DISTRICT, CANADA. BY UOBEKT BELI-, B. A. SC, M. D., LL. P., ASSFST.VNT DIRKCTOU OF THE GEOLOGICAL hUUVEY OF CANADA. With an Appendix on THE SILICIFIED GLASS-BRECCIA OP VERMILION RIVER, SUDBURY DISTRICT. BY (JEOUOE ir. WriJ.IAMS. {Read before theSocieiy December 31, 1890.) CONTENTS. Page. Introduction 125 The Ge()l(>!j;y of the District 126 The Ores find their A^isociiitions 131 Mode of Occurrence t)f tlie Ores 133 The Genesis of the Ores 135 Extent and Associations of the Ores 130 The Silieified Glass-Breccia of Vermilion River, Sudbury District 138 Introduction. The town of Sudhnry, a creation of the CanacHan Pacific railway, is situ- ated in the backwoods of Ontario, thirty-six miles north of the nioutii of French river, on Lake Huron. Parts of the surrounding country are tol- erably level, but in a general way this region may be said to be hilly. Some sections are very broken and rugged, whilG in others rocky ridges alternate with swamps or alluvial intervals. Occasional tracts of land are fit for cul- tivation, but, as a rule, where the surface does not consist of rock or swamp it is much encumbered with bowlders. At one time the district supported large quantities of white-pine tin)l)er, but forest fires at different periods have destroyed the greater part of it and inferior kinds of wood are now growing XIX— UiH.L. GKiir.. Hoc. Am., Voi,. 2, 18i)(). ('-'"*) 12() I!. I'.KI.I. — NICKKL AN1» Cori'Klt DKroslTS OK SI IHilllY. up in it« place. Kock niiipio, red oak, l)lack bircli and other hard woods form coni-ideraljle groves in some sections. Tiie general elevation of this tract is pnjl)al)]y between 800 and 1,000 feet above the sea. The construction of the Canadian Pacific railway In 1(S82 led to the dis- covery of nickel and copper, besides various other metals, in this part of the province, and now the Sudbury district promises to become of great impor- tance as a mining region. It may be remarked in j)assing that Sudbury is not the name of a political division but is merely a convenient rimi(jciiii(.'^. ( 'onsider- iiif^ how very rare the discovery of elejihantine remains of any kind has hitherto heen overall that trreat jiortion of the continent hetween Bering strait and the vicinity of lake Erie, we may reasonahly expect that among * Hull. till uf the t'. S. (ifol. Siiivrv, no. Hi. 18!l2. 128 It. JJi:i-L — NICKKL AND COPPKIl UEl'OSIT.S OF SUDBUKY. Ill the district under consideration the main lino of the Canadian Pacific railway crosses, almost at rij^ht angles, the narrowest part of the Huronian helt proper, which has here a width of only about twenty-four miles. The strike is therefore northeast and southwest, and in this pinched portion of the trough the rocks on the opposite sides dip at high angles toward the center. Sudbury Junction is situated southeast of the center of the trough, and from it the Hault Ste. Alarie branch of the railway runs upon the gen- eral strike of the Huronion rocks throughout almost its entire length. At thirty-three miles northwest of Sudbury Junction, or near Geneva lake, the main line enters upon an outlying basin of stratified Huronian rocks meas- uring eight miles in width on the railway by seventeen in length from north- east to southwest, and having a long point running westward into the town- siiip of Craig. This, for convenience, may be called the Geneva lake outlier. At the southern extremity of Onaping lake, a few miles to the north of this outlier, there is a smaller one, measuring only three miles in width by four in length. Tlie various members of the Huronian system in the Sudbury district are of much interest in connection with questions relating to metamorphism and the origin of crystalline rocks, and also as illustrations of the general char- acter of the system in this part of Canada. They consist principally of gray- wackes and (juart/ites, various forms of diorites, quartz-diorites and horn- blende schists, mica schists, diabases, argillaceous sandstones, black and drab clay slates, together with volcanic breccias, in addition to the gneiss and quartz-syenite already referred to. The rocks which occur in greatest cjuantity in the stratified Huronian belt between lakes Huron and Wahnapitie, and which constitute the lowest members of the series, are ([uartzose graywackes and (piartzites, with occa- sionally a little felsite. Thick bands of quartzites, mostly very light in color and standing at high angles, form the conspicuous range of La Cloche mountains overlooking Lake Huron and the long narrow points projecting into that lake between Spanish river and Killaniey. The fact that this great local development of (juart/ites happens to occur at the most accessible part of our principal Huronian belt has given rise to the erroneous notion that the Huronian rocks of Camida in general consist mostly of these rocks. The quartzites of the region about La Cloche appear to belong to three or four belts which double around in a synclinal form, and are thus repeated within com|)aratively narrow limits, (^uartzite constitutes tiie principal rock all around Lake Panache and along the lower parts of Vermilion and S[)anish rivers, but further to the northea.stward, or in the contracted part of the belt of the Sudbury district, the corresponding rocks, with a greatly diminished volume, are much mixed with felsnathic and argillaceous matter, constituting massive graywackes; Avhile still further on, or in the country f i i DIOKITK INTHUSIOXS 1\ (iUAY WACKKS AND «iUAUT/ITKS. 120 east of Lake AViilinapitfe, they have passed almost entirely into pure argil- litcs, which are there very extensively ed are found cutting the gneiss and quartz-syenite areas of this region. They are each al)out a mile wide in the middle. Both run northeast and southwest, or parallel to the general strike of the stratified portions of the Huronian rocks nearest to them, and diminish to narrow jioints at the extremities. The first of these commences at Wliitson lake, in the township of Blezard, and runs southwestward into Denison, a distance of twenty-tour miles, while the second has been traced from the northeastern part of Levack for about eighteen miles southwestward. Most of the heavier deposits of iiickeliferous ore, so far discovered, are asso- ciated with these two diorite belts, and they will be again referred to in this connection. A smaller dioritic intrusion, apparently of the same class as i i 130 I!. IJKI.I, — XK'KKL AM) COPrKH DKl'OSITS OK Slhlil IJY. tlioise two and ninning piinillt'l witli them, is found in the northeastern part of tlie township of Morgan. The next niend)er of the series, in ascending order, is the most remarkable of all. It consists of a thick l)elt of nearly black volcanic breccia, which luis been traced from Vermilion lake nortiieastward in the valley of Ver- milion river to beyond the latitude of Wahnapita' lake. It is a compact silicious rock, with conclioidal fracture and consists of angular fragments, mostly small, closely crowded together and flecked with irregular angular white spots. These Dr. G. H. Williams finds to consist of fragments of pumice, which, while retaining their structure, are completely replaced by ; silica. This band appears to be several thousand feet thick and, as it has resisted denudation well, forms an elevated, rougii and broken country along its whole extent. f The highest rocks of the series in this district, or those which occupy the center of the trough, are made up of evenly bedded ilrab and grtiy argilla- ceous sandstones or graywackes, interstratiKed with shaly or slaty !)eits, and overlain at the sunnnit by black slates. As these rocks dip at comparatively low angles, they occu])y a greater geographical width than the other mem- ^ bers in proportion to their thickness, which, however, must be very consid- erable. Along the lower part of Spanish river, above and i)elow the great bend, the Iluronian belt has a wider spread than near Sudbury Junction and here we find a consideraljle development of rocks associated with the quartzites which are not met with to the northeastward in the district under consideration. Among these are, soft bluish-gray satiny sericitic schist, sometimes ligniform, accompanied by nearly l)lack hornblendic schist ; coarse and llMe-graiiied glossy green and greenish-gray schist ; silver-gray line-grained mica-schist, studded with crystals of staurolite ; hard green schist ; dark-gray clay-slate; fine-grained greenish-gray silicious felsite ; and slaty graywacke, passing into gneiss. Tiie stratiiied Huronian rocks and also the gneiss and (piartz-syeiiite of Sudbury district are traversed by dikes of gray, coarsely crystalline diabase, which are often large and can be traced for considerable distances. Their commonest course is about west-northwest. They all have the same physical characters and appear to be of identical composition. The sound, fresh rock is extremely tough, but the ex[)osed surfaces disintegrate easily under the weather into brown crumbling debris, especially along tlu; joint-planes and at their angles. The outer portions of the masses thus separated scale off concentrically, so that they become rounded and bowlder-like. These dikes, J as we shall show further on, a[)parently p'ay an important part in the economic geology of the district. ■f Tin; OiiKs and tuvam Assocfations. Refeniiiji now to the nickel and copper ores for which this district is he- coining Cninous, it may he remarked, in the first phice, that there is much iiniforniity l)()th as to the characters of the ores themselves and the condi- tions under wliich they occur. Yet these deposits are not confined to the nndonhtod Hiironian rocks, hut are ecjualiy alxindant within the gneiss and tliuM't/.-syenite areas. They may be said to he connected witii a certain geo- graphical area rather than with a single geological horizon. In other words, it woidtl seem as if, within certain limits, the ores might have had their origin beneath all tlie rocks found at the surface. The ore consists in all cases of a mixture of clialcopyrite and iiickeliferous i)yrrhotite. The area over which this ore has been found up to the present time extends from the Wallace mine, on Lake Huron, in the vicinity of La Cloche, northeastward to the north side of Lake Walinapitie, a distance of about seventy miles, and from the southeastern boundary of the Pluroiiian belt, in the Sudbury district, nortliwesfward to the limits of the (Jeneva lake outlier, a distance of about fifty miles. It is rather singular, first, that pyrrhotite should exist so commonly within this region as compared with any other in the country, and, secondly, that no matter in m hat kind of rock we find it to occur, it should generally be nick- eliferous to an economic extent. Although, as a rule, pyrrhotite, wherever found, contains traces of nickel, it has only been detected in commercial quantities in a few places in other parts of the world.* The investigations of the writer in the Sudbury district have shown that the cond)ined nickel and copper ore is found on or near certain lines of contact between diorite, on the one hand, and j.'ueiss or quartz-syenite most frequently on the other, but only at certain points on these lines. As no circumstance is without a cause, we may look for some reason which determines the concentration of the ore at one place more than another, and the writer believes he has found the reason in this case to consist in the intersection of the ore-bearing belts near these occurrences either by one of the diabase dikes above described or else from the pinching in or perhaps from a transverse disturbance of the belt. The ore seems to have been derived in all ca^es from the diorite, but for some reason the proximity of the gneiss or quartz-syenite appears to be also fiivorable fi)r the production of the large deposits. If the diorite flowed out originally upon the nearly horizontal surface of the other rock, the constituents of the ore which it contained may have sought the ♦ Assays Imve renently been made of samples of pyrrhotite from near Shreiber and Jiickfish bay, Lake Hiippnor, Htid from the coiinlies of Peterboro', Hastings, and Laimrli, in Ontiirio, none of winch yieUkMi more tliiiri traoes of niokel. 132 R. V,ELT. — NICKEr, AND COlM'KI! DKPOSITS OK SUDBURY. U)\V('r portiiMi of the mass; or if it were injected between tlie j)reexi.stiiig rocks, these materials may have been impelled to the sides. Ill some cases the belts of diorite are much broken up and disturbed longi- tudinally, and along these horizons they are mixed with large and small fragments of other rocks showing lines of volcanic movement during their formation. JCxamples of coarsely itrecciated diorite of this kind may be seen near the Dominion mine, the Stobie mine, and thence southwestward to beyond the Canadian Pacific railway, at the Copper Cliff, the Crean or Mc- Coiniell and the V^ermilion mines, in Denison, at Ross' location north of Morgan township, in the northeastern part of Lcvack and near the western end of JJannerman lake. This condition of the diorite seems liivorablc for the production of the ore, probably on account of the physical disturbance which it indicates. The lines of northeast and southwest disturbance, along which successive occuirences of the ore are found, cannot always be traced con- tinuously on the ground, but as the evidences of such disturbances make their appearance from place to place upon these lines, and as geological breaks are apt to be very persistent, we nuiy infer that they are continuous. The first of the two long, narrow intrusions of gray crystalline diorite which have been referre represents a hand specimen of the ore from t\\^ Stobie mine. It was traced directly from nature and reduce('. to one-half the linear dimen- sions. The portion shaded horizontally sliovvs pyrrhotite, the verti(uil shad- ing chalcopyrite and the dotted areas rounded fragments of the silicious country rock. Numerous analyses of the ores have shown that the nickel is confined to the ))yrrliotite, in which it is present in the proportion of about 1 to o per cent. ; but it has not been determined whether it replaces a corresponding proportion of iron uniformly throughout the mass or exists in the form of dis.seminated grains of ])olydymite. This mineral occur,s as crystals, plainly visible in some of the ores from the Worthiiigtoii mine, in the townsiiip of Drury. TiiK Gknksis ok TIIK OllKS. The ore bodies of tin; Sudbury district do not appear to have been accumu- lated like ordinary metalliferous veins from mineral matter inaiiueous solu- tion, but to bave resulted from igneous fusion. The fact that they are always associated with diorite, which has been left in its present positions in a molten state, points in this direction. As the diorite and the 8ul[)hides fuse at about loO Ji. IJKM- NJCKKJ. AM) COlM'l^ll DKI'C t.SlTS OF SfDIU i;V. the same temperature, they would naturally accompany each other when in the Huid condition. The bodies of molten diorite, being large, would remain Huid for a HufHcient time to aHow the dilliised sulphuretted metals to gather themselves together at certain centers by their mutual attractions and by concretionary action. Jn the case of great irrupted masses of diorite, the bodies of ore which had formed near enough to the solid walls cooled and lodged with a nnxture of the broken wall-rocks where we now find them, while larger (puiutities, remaining tluid, probably sank slowly back through the liquid diorite to unknown depths. The causes which, at a subsequent time, favored the production of transverse dikes probably aided in determin- ing the deposition of the ore near certain lines rather than elsewhere. If we suppose that the molten sulphides abstracted themselves, by the laws of mutual attraction, from the general mass of the fluid rock and got together in considerable quantities in an intinuitely mingled form, the two kinds would tend by the same laws to separate themselves from one auother, like going to like, just as salts of diflerent kinds will separate into their respective crystals from an aqueous solution, because there is analogous action between nii.xtures li(iuefied by heat and by solution in a su[)ersaturated menstruum. A study of the relations of the pyrrhotite and chalcopyrite to each other in these mixed ores and of the ores of the parent rock shows that this view is in accordanc(> with the facts, and that it is probably a satisfactory explana- tion of the phenomena. Xo theory (jfaipieous deposition appears to account for the facts in connection with these ore bodies; still we do occasionally observe limited local moditications of the ore which may have been due to the solvent action of water with subsequent precipitation of mineral matters long after the consolidation of the mass. This is more particularly the case with regard to the chalcopyrite. Crystals of quartz and of the felspars and rarely of apatite are found end)edded in the ore. EXTKNT AND ASSOCIATIONS OK TIIK OuKS. Other metals, including gold, i)latinum, tin, lead, silver, zinc and iron, have been found in the Sudbury district, and probably some of them may prove to exist there in paying quantities. The presence of a considerable })ropor- tion of nickel in the ore of the Wallace mine, on the shore of Lake Huron and in the strike of the Sudbury deposits, was ascertained by Dr. Hunt more than forty years ago ; yet the presence of this metal in the latter does not seem to have been suspected for a considerable time after they had been worked for copper alone. The ifuronian is notably a copper-bearing sys- tem. West of Sudbury, in the great belt we have already traced, this metal occurs around Hatchawana bay, north of Sault Ste. Marie, at Little Tidke George and Echo lake, at Huron Copper bay, in Wellington and Bruce mines* ASSOrlATIOI) OltK.S. 137 on Thessalou and MissLssagui rivers, and elsewhere. To the northeastward it has been found on botli sides of Lake Wahnapitie, on Teniaf^nuui and Lady ]')velyn hikes, along Montreal and liUmche rivers, on the watershed east of the canoe route between lakes Teniiseaniiiig and Abbittibi, and finally near the southern extremity of Lake Mistassini. The search for this metal along the Huronian belt, which has been described above as running for more than 000 miles, is only in its infancy, and the copper-mining industry may some day be very extensively carried on in various parts of this, as yet, almost unknown section of Canada. THE SILICIFIEI) (1 LASS-BRECCIA OF VEL'MILTON JiJVER, S UDJi Un 1 ' I) IS Tin < 'T. IIY (iKOIKJK II. WII.MAMS. (liidd befiirr llu- S laki;, where it cuts aci'oss the river and ('ontinucs on northeastward ; but its limit iti that direction has not been accurately ascertained beyond foity miles tVom the township of Trill. In tbi.- town- (i;38) LOCATION OF TIIK fiT.ASS-mjFrciA. 1.19 § -hip il (\irnis ii slmrp olljow appsirontly ijctUtiE; nrouiid an anticlinnl axis aiul runs off to tliL' ca^twiiril "11 tlu> ^mithorii side of Verinilioii lake; hut licre, as aliovc stated, it passf'S into a shi ;■ conghjuieratu lioidiiig pobhlc.'s c>f syonito. In tills Coitii it is traoe- ahU.' ahoiit ten miles more. "A i;ii()J 8(!t'ti()n of tlio typical foi'in of tlio hroccia may be soon in tin; ciittings near Onajiinuj, when' llio Canadian I'acitio railway intersects it, twenty-three miles north- west of Sudhury Junction. It hr.s an average breadth of fully a mile, and as it dips at angles of 4")° and iijiwards it must have a thickness of over 4,000 feet. Owing to its hardness and toughness it has resisted denudation better than the sandstones and argillites, and it rises a f(!W hundred feet above the lattt^r in the form of a range of rugged hills overlooking the comparatively level country on the southeast. Along its northwestern side it is separated, in jdaees at least, from the quartz syenite by a massive band of asli-gray (juartzite containing usually an abundance of white quartz pebbles scattered through it. " It was supposed that from its compact nature this breccia might be iis(;d in orna- mental (''instruction ; but, while it gives a good, smooth surface, it has not been found susceptible of fine pidish." Ill a hand .fpeciiiien this rock presents a nearly bhick felsitie matrix, in which are enil)e(U!e(l s-harply angular or .slightly rounded fragments, vary- ing from Ij em. in diameter downwards to ultra-mieroseopie dimensions. The.se fragments are lighter in color than the matrix, hut diHer consideralilv among them.selves in their tint, structure and composition. The majority resemble chalcedony in appearance, others are greenish, while some of the largest fragments are now replaced hy a single calcite individual. Occa- sional small grains of clear vitreous (piartz may also he detected, while specks of magnetic pyrites (pyrrhotite) are everywhere al)undant. Many of the angular fragments show distinctly under the lens a flow or vesicular struc- ture, which is .still more apparent in a thin section of the rock when seen under the micro.scope. Fkh'uk i.—ScclidU (if .silicitud GI