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Gold Deposits as a Proxy to Identify Paleoseismic Cycles: A Numerical Investigation

Description: 

Western Australia’s long-lived gold mines may serve as geologic proxies for paleoseismicity in the continental crust. Orogenic gold deposits in stable intraplate terranes have long been linked to seismically driven fluid migration, consistent with the fault-valve paradigm. Cox (2004) proposed that clusters of Archean gold lodes occupy persistent aftershock damage zones at major fault jogs where ruptures repeatedly arrested, implying that ancient ore localization could correlate with recurring seismicity and post-seismic fluid flow. More recently, Cox (2016) demonstrated that injection of overpressured fluids into low-permeability faults induces prolific swarm seismicity and rapid vein emplacement, reinforcing the interpretation that these deposits record repeated seismic cycling rather than single large earthquakes . Furthermore, recent synthesis by Williams et al. (2022) shows that coseismic quartz precipitation only weakly seals fault permeability, allowing fluid pathways to persist across multiple seismic cycles in the brittle crust .

Building on these concepts, this study will integrate regional GIS datasets (bedrock fault maps, geology, and gold mine locations from the Geological Survey of Western Australia) with geomechanical modeling using PyLith to investigate stress transfer, fault reactivation potential, and fluid redistribution through the seismic cycle. Numerical experiments will explore how stress perturbations associated with repeated fault slip, including at the brittle–ductile transition, may localize long-lived permeability and fluid focusing. By testing whether gold deposit distributions align with modeled paleoseismic stress concentrations or cumulative aftershock volumes, this work investigates whether ore systems can be used as spatial proxies for long-term seismogenic behavior in stable continental crust. The results are expected to inform interpretations of fault longevity, intraplate seismicity, and the co-evolution of fluid–fault systems over million-year timescales.

Session: The Landscape Record of Earthquakes and Faulting - III

Type: Oral

Date: 4/16/2026

Presentation Time: 03:00 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Robert L. Walker

Student Presenter: No

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