Orogenic gold in the Kibali granite-greenstone terrane, NE Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Kibali deposit, with a current resource estimate of 18 600 000 oz Au and first production expected in 2014, is a series of stacked dipping lodes divided into mineralised corridors hosted within volcano-sedimentary conglomerates in one of the last unexplored Archaean greenstone belts in the world; gold is texturally associated with finely disseminated pyrite. Its structural setting within a thrust stack differs from orogenic deposits linked to a major, steeply dipping strike-slip fault: the preliminary model is that ore-forming fluids produced by metamorphic devolatilisation under upper greenschist facies, deep within the thrust wedge, migrated upward and southward along dipping thrust faults where mineralisation occurred in dilational sites at the intersections with lateral ramps.
The Kibali deposit, with a current resource estimate of 18 600 000 oz Au and first production expected in 2014, is a series of stacked dipping lodes divided into mineralised corridors hosted within volcano-sedimentary conglomerates in one of the last unexplored Archaean greenstone belts in the world; gold is texturally associated with finely disseminated pyrite. Its structural setting within a thrust stack differs from orogenic deposits linked to a major, steeply dipping strike-slip fault: the preliminary model is that ore-forming fluids produced by metamorphic devolatilisation under upper greenschist facies, deep within the thrust wedge, migrated upward and southward along dipping thrust faults where mineralisation occurred in dilational sites at the intersections with lateral ramps.