Origins of Copper (split from Bucket List thread)

[1dave]

Jan 5, 2018 16:53:50 GMT -5 youp50 said:

Jan 4, 2018 16:40:00 GMT -5 1dave said:

1. Quartzsite
2. The Geode Kid Collection

. . .
13. Copper meteorites.  Please help me here,  I have never heard of such a thing.  Copper was laid in the basalt along with felspar and calcite.  I have heard some mines had quartz also.  Some was moved along by glaciers as far south as Green Bay WI.  Float copper.  There are copper crystals.  Copper hybrids, they have bits of silver on them.

Everything on this planet came from outer space.

Copper is heavy. When the planet was differentiated the copper sank below everything lighter than nickle. EVERYTHING except (but including) the real light stuff on the surface is a new arrival.

[Deleted]

Jan 5, 2018 16:53:50 GMT -5 youp50 said:

13. Copper meteorites.  Please help me here,  I have never heard of such a thing.  Copper was laid in the basalt along with felspar and calcite.  I have heard some mines had quartz also.  Some was moved along by glaciers as far south as Green Bay WI.  Float copper.  There are copper crystals.  Copper hybrids, they have bits of silver on tem.(sic)

Copper and every other element on this planet wasn't formed here. It was formed in stars billions of years ago.

As 1dave stated, when the planet formed, all the densest stuff sank to the core. Makes sense to me.

So how does gold, copper, platinum, uranium and the rest get to the surface? I suppose that the copper could have welled up with the basalt in a volcanic event. But was the molten basalt also hot enough to melt copper?

I don't know. But, it looks like a meteorite to me.

[youp50]

So how does one differentiate meteorite copper from float copper?

I don't buy into everything on earth came from outer space.

[youp50]

That image looks like it was worked over by a glacier to me.

[Deleted]

Jan 5, 2018 22:15:24 GMT -5 youp50 said:

So how does one differentiate meteorite copper from float copper?

I don't buy into everything on earth came from outer space.

Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

[1dave]

Jan 5, 2018 22:15:24 GMT -5 youp50 said:

So how does one differentiate meteorite copper from float copper?

I don't buy into everything on earth came from outer space.

? Where do you think things came from?

The following are just concerned with dust influx, not the asteroids that have made such huge craters all over the earth, most of which have been made in the oceans and obliterated as the continents drifted over them.

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moon-dust.html

"The Age of the Earth" by Chris Stassen

What follows is an excerpt from the talk.origins FAQ file "The Age of the Earth", by Chris Stassen. His target is the meteoritic dust argument as applied to the Moon. However, since the measurements used by the young Earth creation scientists are Earth based, then the argument is equally applicable to the Earth (and has been applied to the Earth by young Earth creationists). I include here the full text of section 3 of the first part of the FAQ, "How Old is the Earth and How Do We Know?". I include this in order to put the argument in proper context for the reader, before going on to describe the current observations and data. I will also reproduce all of the references quoted by Stassen in this section.

[Start of quoted material]

3. Accumulation of meteoritic dust on the moon

This argument: A single measurement of the rate of meteoritic dust influx to the Earth gave a value in the millions of tons per year. While this is negligible compared to the processes of erosion on the Earth (about a shoebox-full of dust per acre per year), there are no such processes on the moon. The moon must receive a similar amount of dust (perhaps 25% as much per unit surface area due to its lesser gravity), and there should be a very large dust layer (about a hundred feet thick) if the moon is several billion years old.

Morris says, regarding the dust influx rate:

"The best measurements have been made by Hans Pettersson, who obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year (1)." (Morris 1974, p. 152) [emphasis added]

Pettersson stood on a mountain top and collected dust there with a device intended for measuring smog levels. He published calculations which measured the amount of nickel he collected, assumed that nickel was only present in meteoritic dust, and assumed that some percentage of meteoritic dust was nickel, to get his final figures (that first assumption was wrong and caused his published figures to be a vast overestimate).

Pettersson's calculation resulted in the a figure of about 15 million tons per year. He believed that estimate to be an over-estimate, and indicated in the paper that 5 million tons per year was a much more likely figure.

ncse.com/cej/4/3/space-dust-moons-surface-age-cosmos

In contrast with the uncertainties associated with earth-based methods of estimating cosmic dust concentration, satellites in space can measure it directly. Using data from dust penetration of satellites, Dohnanyi gave the following direct measurements of cosmic dust influx rates: To the earth 4 x 10-9 grams/per square centimeter (22.6 thousand tons) per year, and to the moon 2 x 10-9 grams per square centimeter (11.3 thousand tons) per year. Assuming a constant influx rate (even though it certainly wasn't) the earth would collect a layer of dust only 60 millimeters (2.4 inches) thick in 4.5 billion years and the moon half that.

This does not take into account the contribution to earth of larger meteoroids, such as the Tunguska object (Ganapathy), that break up on entering the atmosphere. Given the extreme irregularity of such objects, both in size and arrival, the actual dust influx certainly lies somewhere between 23 thousand and 400 thousand tons per year.

[youp50]

"Mutually exclusive" the question is 'why are copper meteorites only common in the UP?'

[youp50]

That cosmic dust is arriving there is no doubt, I will not question the rates. The nature of a spinning globe would tend to deposit a homogenous layer on the planet. What force of nature concentrated metallic copper along the Keeweenaw Fault.

Some pieces of copper are still underground they are too big to extract. One of my favorite relics is a small chunk of copper 3/4" wide 3" long and 1/4" deep, flat on one side wavey on the other. Some mines had massive nuggets. This piece I have is the 'shavings' of men cutting the big ones apart.

[1dave]

Jan 6, 2018 9:00:25 GMT -5 youp50 said:

"Mutually exclusive" the question is 'why are copper meteorites only common in the UP?'

They aren't.
One of my geology professors worked in the mines near Joplin Missouri. He told us of having to dig around copper boulders the size of houses. They couldn't do anything to them, not even able to blast them apart with dynamite.

Look at the huge amounts of malachite found in Africa.
Utah, Arizona, Montana, Canida, Chile, Indonesia, . . .
www.thebalance.com/the-world-s-20-largest-copper-mines-2014-2339745

All elements are manufactured from hydrogen in stars, especially during supernovas. the bigger the star, the more massive the elements formed. The elements are usually mixed together.

The gold nuggets I had from Beauty Bay Alaska were 89% gold, 11% the elements on both sides of it on the periodic table. They were meteorites.

[1dave]

By the way, when I first started studying geology in 1955, there were no floating continents, and absolutely no impact craters on earth.

Anything resembling a crater was volcanic, and anyone that thought different was an idiot.
All that is s-l-o-w-l-y changing.

cintos.org/SaginawManifold/Saginaw_Bay/



What happens when an asteroid hits earth?



As the earth travels around the Milky Way, it passes through multiple supernova debris fields - each different in composition. When a large chunk hits earth it is traveling between 15-70 miles per second.

Often the entire asteroid and a similar amount of whatever the earth consists of at that point is vaporized. Some of those vapors are forced into the fractures around and under the crater. The upper vapor cloud may cover several thousand miles downwind.

Those heavy elements begin condensing, joining together like hail stones, and falling to the ground.
Erosion, volcanoes, glaciers, time.

[Deleted]

Jan 6, 2018 9:00:25 GMT -5 youp50 said:

"Mutually exclusive" the question is 'why are copper meteorites only common in the UP?'

One big one hit there and what you explore is the strewn field.

I agree we would not expect copper meteorites to be common.

ETA,

We kinda just slapped you upside the head with an entirely novel concept. One science doesn't seem to recognize. From your postings here I know you are intelligent and thoughtful. I challenge you to step out of your comfort zone and analyze the concept as a whole.

Look at UP native copper as a strewn field.

Look at "goldfields" in Australia as a strewn field.

Look at the circular shape of the copper occurrences in Arizona and ask yourself why is it this shape?

You mentioned above due to the rotational nature of the earth that space dust should be evenly distributed. Why are some elements not evenly distributed, but instead have "occurrences"?

I am comfortable with saying "because they came in a discrete package from space".

[Deleted]

Jan 6, 2018 12:18:07 GMT -5 1dave said:

By the way, when I first started studying geology in 1955, there were no floating continents, and absolutely no impact craters on earth.

Anything resembling a crater was volcanic, and anyone that thought different was an idiot.
All that is s-l-o-w-l-y changing.

Fortunately for humans it's not advancing on geological time.

[1dave]

Jan 6, 2018 12:33:31 GMT -5 @shotgunner said:

Jan 6, 2018 9:00:25 GMT -5 youp50 said:

"Mutually exclusive" the question is 'why are copper meteorites only common in the UP?'

One big one hit there and what you explore is the strewn field.

I agree we would not expect copper meteorites to be common.

ETA,

We kinda just slapped you upside the head with an entirely novel concept. One science doesn't seem to recognize. From your postings here I know you are intelligent and thoughtful. I challenge you to step out of your comfort zone and analyze the concept as a whole.

Look at UP native copper as a strewn field.

Look at "goldfields" in Australia as a strewn field.

Look at the circular shape of the copper occurrences in Arizona and ask yourself why is it this shape?

You mentioned above due to the rotational nature of the earth that space dust should be evenly distributed. Why are some elements not evenly distributed, but instead have "occurrences"?

I am comfortable with saying "because they came in a discrete package from space".

I was struck by the Gold-Rush episode showing the layer the Hoffmans were working in Alaska was filled with tree limbs and a mastodon tusk. That means that gold got there about 13,000 years ago!

[youp50]

The historical copper mines in the UP followed the strata going under Lake Superior, emerging on Isle Royale. The 'dip' of the ore was from 45 to 70 degrees on the Michigan side. The ore body tailed out to a flat sulphide deposit at White Pine. Just having a hard time with billions of pounds of copper being played down as dust in a few hundred square miles. With a fault line dividing copper and no copper.

I worked not long ago on the only primary nickle mine in the States. A copper, nickle, and iron deposit. (Cool looking pyrite ore) A sulphide deposit. The iron is essentially non-recoverable, I don't recall the compound, only that it would need to be electrolytically refined. So it is wasted, tailings. During a daily safety/production/mine update, the manager was talking about the deposit. The bowling pin shape indicates a high probability of the mother lode nearby. But also how the lava was flowing and turned a corner and the heavy metals settled.

I believe this earth had all the metals, gems, and rocks on it when it was formed. I do not understand how it was formed, just cannot understand how a piece of cosmic dust could join another and another and eventually get big enough to have gravity to add other pieces of dust. And then to organize the ores into different places.

I am quite certain that the copper meteorites are float or stamp copper. Stamp copper being the copper that had the brittle basalt, epidote, and feldspars stamped off it.

Now on a different note, the real gem up there is the dark copper to white colored porcelain type datolite. And the hybrid copper silver specimens. Copper and silver setting one on another. No heat involved in laying those two, or they would alloy.

[Sabre52]

Ummm not to quibble, but when I first got interested in geology in the 1950s, the floating continents theory had been around for like a good forty years already and of course, the Canyon Diablo meteor impact crater in Arizona had been well known and described since the late 19th century.

I was always super interested in the gold lode deposits in Hunters Valley where I hunted poppy jasper. The gold was associated with a greenstone deposit called the blue drift which was of Jurassic age and at least one local miner called Hunters Valley, Jurassic park. I believe though, the the actual lode gold was a much younger intrusion into the base rock which was marine in origin. Guess the upthrust of the Sierras may have brought the gold into the greenstone. I wish I knew more about the area as the geology is very confusing. Odd having such a nice poppy and brecciated jasper deposit in the Sierra foothills far from the coast range Franciscan deposits. Never been able to find anything specifically written about those jasper deposits except they were discovered in the mid 1960s and most the good stuff was said to have been sent to Germany.....Mel

[1dave]

Jan 6, 2018 19:30:00 GMT -5 youp50 said:

The historical copper mines in the UP followed the strata going under Lake Superior, emerging on Isle Royale. The 'dip' of the ore was from 45 to 70 degrees on the Michigan side. The ore body tailed out to a flat sulphide deposit at White Pine. Just having a hard time with billions of pounds of copper being played down as dust in a few hundred square miles. With a fault line dividing copper and no copper.

I worked not long ago on the only primary nickle mine in the States. A copper, nickle, and iron deposit. (Cool looking pyrite ore) A sulphide deposit. The iron is essentially non-recoverable, I don't recall the compound, only that it would need to be electrolytically refined. So it is wasted, tailings. During a daily safety/production/mine update, the manager was talking about the deposit. The bowling pin shape indicates a high probability of the mother lode nearby. But also how the lava was flowing and turned a corner and the heavy metals settled.

I believe this earth had all the metals, gems, and rocks on it when it was formed. I do not understand how it was formed, just cannot understand how a piece of cosmic dust could join another and another and eventually get big enough to have gravity to add other pieces of dust. And then to organize the ores into different places.

I am quite certain that the copper meteorites are float or stamp copper. Stamp copper being the copper that had the brittle basalt, epidote, and feldspars stamped off it.

Now on a different note, the real gem up there is the dark copper to white colored porcelain type datolite. And the hybrid copper silver specimens. Copper and silver setting one on another. No heat involved in laying those two, or they would alloy.

Here is where I am coming from:
forum.rocktumblinghobby.com/thread/68649/dying-times

[1dave]

Jan 6, 2018 22:37:32 GMT -5 Sabre52 said:

Ummm not to quibble, but when I first got interested in geology in the 1950s, the floating continents theory had been around for like a good forty years already and of course, the Canyon Diablo meteor impact crater in Arizona had been well known and described since the late 19th century.

I was always super interested in the gold lode deposits in Hunters Valley where I hunted poppy jasper. The gold was associated with a greenstone deposit called the blue drift which was of Jurassic age and at least one local miner called Hunters Valley, Jurassic park. I believe though, the the actual lode gold was a much younger intrusion into the base rock which was marine in origin. Guess the upthrust of the Sierras may have brought the gold into the greenstone. I wish I knew more about the area as the geology is very confusing. Odd having such a nice poppy and brecciated jasper deposit in the Sierra foothills far from the coast range Franciscan deposits. Never been able to find anything specifically written about those jasper deposits except they were discovered in the mid 1960s and most the good stuff was said to have been sent to Germany.....Mel

As usual the old bulls have to die before the young bucks get their turn.
For impacts it took Gene Shoemaker to bring the scientists up to speed.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker

Shoemaker was also well known for his studies of terrestrial craters, such as Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona. Shoemaker was the first scientist to conclude that these craters were caused by meteor impact.
. . .
Scientific contributions

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) hired Shoemaker in 1950.[d] His first assignment was to search for uranium deposits in Utah and Colorado. His next mission was to study volcanic processes, since other investigators had already noticed that uranium deposits were often located in the vents of ancient volcanoes. This study led him to explore the Hopi Buttes of Northern Arizona, which happened to be near Meteor Crater.[9]

Daniel Barringer, an entrepreneur and mining engineer who had discovered Meteor Crater in 1891, had postulated that it had been caused by the impact of a meteor. About the same time, G. K. Gilbert, the chief geologist of the USGS, examined the crater and announced that it had been created by an explosive venting of volcanic steam. A majority of scientists accepted Gilbert's explanation of the cause of the crater, This theory remained as conventional wisdom until Shoemaker's investigations a half century later.[9]

Antonio Snider-Pellegrini's Illustration of the closed and opened Atlantic Ocean (1858).

The idea of floating continents was first formally presented by Alfred Wegener in 1912, but not accepted until Jack Oliver's proof in 1968

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift

Rejection of Wegener's theory, 1910s–1950s

The theory of continental drift was not accepted for many years. One problem was that a plausible driving force was missing.[2] A second problem was that Wegener's estimate of the velocity of continental motion, 250 cm/year, was implausibly high.[32] (The currently accepted rate for the separation of the Americas from Europe and Africa is about 2.5 cm/year).[33] And it did not help that Wegener was not a geologist. Other geologists also believed that the evidence that Wegener had provided was not sufficient. It is now accepted that the plates carrying the continents do move across the Earth's surface, although not as fast as Wegener believed; ironically one of the chief outstanding questions is the one Wegener failed to resolve: what is the nature of the forces propelling the plates?[2]

The British geologist Arthur Holmes championed the theory of continental drift at a time when it was deeply unfashionable. He proposed in 1931 that the Earth's mantle contained convection cells that dissipated radioactive heat and moved the crust at the surface.[34] His Principles of Physical Geology, ending with a chapter on continental drift, was published in 1944.[35]

David Attenborough, who attended university in the second half of the 1940s, recounted an incident illustrating its lack of acceptance then: "I once asked one of my lecturers why he was not talking to us about continental drift and I was told, sneeringly, that if I could prove there was a force that could move continents, then he might think about it. The idea was moonshine, I was informed."[36]

Geological maps of the time showed huge land bridges spanning the Atlantic and Indian oceans to account for the similarities of fauna and flora and the divisions of the Asian continent in the Permian era but failing to account for glaciation in India, Australia and South Africa.[37]

As late as 1953 – just five years before Carey[38] introduced the theory of plate tectonics – the theory of continental drift was rejected by the physicist Scheidegger on the following grounds.[39]

First, it had been shown that floating masses on a rotating geoid would collect at the equator, and stay there. This would explain one, but only one, mountain building episode between any pair of continents; it failed to account for earlier orogenic episodes.
Second, masses floating freely in a fluid substratum, like icebergs in the ocean, should be in isostatic equilibrium (in which the forces of gravity and buoyancy are in balance). But gravitational measurements showed that many areas are not in isostatic equilibrium.
Third, there was the problem of why some parts of the Earth's surface (crust) should have solidified while other parts were still fluid. Various attempts to explain this foundered on other difficulties.

Geophysicist Jack Oliver is credited with providing seismologic evidence supporting plate tectonics which encompassed and superseded continental drift with the article "Seismology and the New Global Tectonics", published in 1968, using data collected from seismologic stations, including those he set up in the South Pacific.[40][41]

John McPhee's presentation on assembling California is excellent as is his whole book:
www.amazon.com/Annals-Former-World-John-McPhee/dp/0374518734/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1515298072&sr=8-1&keywords=annals+of+the+former+world

[gemfeller]

As I remember the proof of so-called "continental drift" emerged from oceanographic work done during the International Geophysical Year, 1957 thru 1958. Wegener's theorizing became reality with the discovery of sea floor spreading via the mid-oceanic ridges.

The conveyor-belt-like extrusion of new magma along the ridges accounts for subduction at plate boundaries. And that process explains a number of things that were sort've glossed over in my college geology classes. Like the earthquakes and volcanism around the Ring of Fire and other plate boundaries, and most orogeny (mountain-building). I never quite bought the old notion of mountain-building being related to some vague process of isostasy. It didn't make sense to me. But with plate subduction it now does, at least for some areas of the globe.

Plate tectonics, like all other areas of science, is never "settled." New discoveries emerge year to year and many mysteries remain. Still, it explains much in the macro sense and ties a whole bunch of scientific disciplines into a whole.

[fernwood]

Am loving this discussion of strewn fields, possible impact sights, etc. Information contained in the links is very good.

[vegasjames]

Jan 5, 2018 22:14:08 GMT -5 @shotgunner said:

Jan 5, 2018 16:53:50 GMT -5 youp50 said:

13. Copper meteorites.  Please help me here,  I have never heard of such a thing.  Copper was laid in the basalt along with felspar and calcite.  I have heard some mines had quartz also.  Some was moved along by glaciers as far south as Green Bay WI.  Float copper.  There are copper crystals.  Copper hybrids, they have bits of silver on tem.(sic)

Copper and every other element on this planet wasn't formed here. It was formed in stars billions of years ago.

As 1dave stated, when the planet formed, all the densest stuff sank to the core. Makes sense to me.

So how does gold, copper, platinum, uranium and the rest get to the surface? I suppose that the copper could have welled up with the basalt in a volcanic event. But was the molten basalt also hot enough to melt copper?

A short article on copper deposit formation:  www.australianminesatlas.gov.au/education/down_under/copper/formed.html