Erin Thompson

Erin Thompson is an economic geology PhD student with interests in igneous petrology, geochemistry and magmatic sulfide deposits. Her PhD is focussing on the magmatic controls on Ni-Cu-PGE grade in the northern Bushveld Complex, South Africa.

Solid Earth

The Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex, South Africa is host to the world’s largest resource of platinum-group elements (PGE), along with significant nickel, copper and cobalt in a complex magmatic sulfide ore deposit. All of these resources are linked with environmentally-friendly technologies and energy usages in the automotive industry, with the PGE being essential components in catalytic converters (including Pd which has more than tripled in price in the past five years), and Ni, Co and Cu critical metals in Electric Vehicle batteries. As such, the northern limb of the Bushveld is likely going to play a large part in the switch to cleaner automotive technology.

The major deposit in the Critical Zone of the northern Bushveld (commonly known as the ‘Platreef’) rests directly on variable basement of Archaean and Paleoproterozoic units at surface. Down dip, it overlies Bushveld Complex Lower Zone rocks; themselves prospective for base metal sulfide mineralisation. The stratigraphy, structure, mineralization styles and metal budgets of the Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex show important differences to the other limbs of the complex. The underlying causes behind these differences are poorly understood and no geological model exists to investigate them on anything more than a local scale.

This research aims to tackle questions surrounding the magmatic and structural controls on the emplacement of the various magmatic units, which appear to have their own, variable metal budgets and thicknesses. This focusses on processes that occur prior to and during emplacement, including magma source and contamination, and are critical to understanding the genetic and exploration models. The project is in partnership with Anglo American, who have been mining the Platreef via surface methods since the 1990s, and now operate the world’s largest PGE surface mining operation at the Mogalakwena Mine. Whilst the near-surface resources are reasonably well characterised, the down dip potential and extension of resources is known, but has had no research work completed on it thus far.

• Dr Dave Holwell (University of Leicester)
• Dr Marc Reichow (University of Leicester)
• Prof Tom Blenkinsopp (Cardiff University)
• Dr Iain McDonald (Cardiff University)
• Dr Hannah Hughes (Camborne School of Mines)
• Andy Lloyd (Anglo American)