Full Title: Contributions to a Knowledge of the Lead and Zinc Deposits of the Mississippi Valley Region
Editor: Edson S. Bastin
From the original foreword: The Mississippi Valley region has long held the dominant position in the domestic production of both lead and zinc and has been an important factor in bringing the United States into a position of world leadership in the production of these metals. The situation of these deposits in a mid-continent region of continually growing industrial importance, their large areal extent, and prolonged productivity have made them the object of repeated study by State and Federal Geological surveys and by geologists and engineers employed by the mining companies, and an amazingly voluminous literature concerning them has accumulated in the course of nearly 50 years of intermittent investigation. Almost from the beginning of such studies scientific opinion on the origin of the ores has wavered back and forth between the concept that the ore-depositing solutions emanated from deep-lying bodies of igneous magmas and the view that the metals were scattered in minute amounts through the country rocks and had been dissolved from them by meteoric waters and precipitated in concentrated form in the present ore bodies. Not in the hope of settling this old and vexing problem but of hastening its eventual solution, these ore deposits became the object of special attention by the National Research Council through a subcommittee of its Committee on the Processes of Ore Deposition that was organized in 1932, and a number of papers that were partly stimulated by this committee’s activities have already been published. The committee felt that its official activities could appropriately be concluded by the preparation of a critical summary of certain geologic factors lying at the foundation of any adequate understanding of the genesis of the ores. The papers of this series are presented in the hope that they will be of material aid to future students of the ores of the Mississippi Valley province. Dr. G. C. Branner and H. S. McQueen, though not contributing in writing, have contributed informally in important measure to the work.
Published: 12/30/1939
ISBN Number: 9780813720241
Pages: 161
Product Category: EBooks