Iron Ore at 5,000 Meters
Associate Professor Adam Simon and PhD student Tristan Childress spent their "spring break" in northern Chile with colleagues Martin Reich (2005 PhD alumnus of our department), now Professor of Geology at the Universidad de Chile, and Artur Deditius (former post-doc with Rod Ewing and Steve Kesler), now Professor of Geology at Murdoch University in Australia. The group did field work at El Laco, a fascinating iron ore deposit located at 5,000 meters elevation in northern Chile just inside the border of the Chile, Bolivia and Argentina triple junction. The ore deposit was described in the early 1960s (by Steve Kesler’s PhD advisor Charles Park) as a lava flow of almost pure magnetite, and geologists have spent the past six decades trying to figure out just how the deposit formed. We think we made some groundbreaking observations, or perhaps it was just the lack of oxygen.