PhD Studentship: Mineralization and metal deportment in the Redmoor deposit, Cornwall. TARGET NERC Centre for Doctoral Training PhD studentship 2025/26 Entry

TARGET is the Training and Research Group for Energy Transition Mineral Resources, a UKRI NERC sponsored Centre for Doctoral Training.

TARGET will support interdisciplinary researchers through a comprehensive training programme to develop your skills in various aspects of meeting mineral resources challenge. Your training will prepare you for a career at the forefront of mineral resources and the energy transition, whether your future is in academia, industry, or policy.

Project Information 

Project Highlights: 

• Development of new mineralization model for the Redmoor sheeted vein deposit. 
• Mineral mapping and deportment of minor and trace metals. 
• Establishment of predictive geometallurgy framework for the deposit. 

Overview: 

The Redmoor deposit is a large, unexploited resource of tungsten, tin and copper located in Cornwall, UK. It is a newly discovered resource that is situated below the historical workings of the Redmoor mine. It has the structure of a sheeted vein system and is assumed to have formed as granite-related hydrothermal fluids escaped from the underlying granite into the surrounding metasedimentary host. 

The deposit is traditionally considered to be equivalent to that at Hemerdon. However, while Hemerdon and other greisen-bordered sheeted vein systems (at Cligga Head and St Michael’s Mount) formed at granite cupolas, the Redmoor deposit occupies a saddle in the underlying granite. The traditional model with fluid escape from a volatile saturated carapace therefore doesn’t make geological sense. Furthermore, the Redmoor deposit is entirely hosted within metapelites and metabasites, whereas Hemerdon (as well as Cligga Head and St Michael’s Mount) straddles the boundaries between the granite and metapelites. 

While the nature and genesis of the Redmoor deposit leads itself to the broad classification as a sheeted vein deposit, it is more complex and includes elements of skarns, greisen-bordered sheeted veins (with and without tourmaline), quartz-tourmaline breccias, polymetallic chlorite-sulphide lodes, as well as cross-course Pb-Zn-Ag veins. Redmoor is unusually rich in tungsten and tin and carries surprisingly high copper and indium concentrations.

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