Laser ablation trace element analyses of rutile and apatite grains from the Zambian Copperbelt

Laser ablation trace element data for rutile and apatite were recovered from Mindola and Nchanga. At Mindola the Kitwe Formation is the major host to Cu-Co (copper-cobalt) mineralisation at Nkana-Mindola, particularly within the Ore Shale member. The Ore Shale has been subdivided into multiple units based on texture and composition. In summary, a black shale or dolomitic siltstone. often with a schistose or banded texture, passes upwards into a coarser porous sandstone or siliceous dolomite and capped by a massive argillite. Mineralisation across Nkana-Mindola is primarily hosted by dolomitic siltstones, pyritic black shales and schists. At Nchanga samples were analysed from the upper and lower ore bodies hosted within the Lower Roan metasediments which unconformably overlie the basement, transitioning from basal continental, arenaceous clastic rocks to shallow marine argillaceous clastic rocks and mixed platform carbonates. Context of samples and methods described in; Chapters 4 and 5 Kelly, Jamie (2024) Dataset for thesis "Constraining Cu-(Co) mineralisation in sediment-hosted copper deposits using rutile, apatite, and carbonate geochronology". University of Southampton doi:10.5258/SOTON/D3219 [Dataset]

Date (Creation): 2025-09-15

Identifier: http://data.bgs.ac.uk/id/dataHolding/13608534

Originator

University of Southampton - Professor Stephen Roberts ( Ocean and Earth Science )

National Oceanography Centre, Waterfront Campus, European Way , Southampton , SO14 3ZH ,

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British Geological Survey - Enquiries

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GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Geology

BGS Thesaurus of Geosciences

Lasers
NGDC Deposited Data
Trace elements
Copper deposits
Rutile

dataCentre

NGDC Deposited Data

Keywords

NERC_DDC

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Other constraints: Available under the Open Government Licence subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying the reproduced NERC materials "Contains NERC materials ©NERC [year]"

Metadata language: EnglishEnglish

Topic category

Geoscientific information

Begin date: 2020-09-01

End date: 2025-09-01

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Excel Spreadsheet (.xlsx) ()

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British Geological Survey - Enquiries

OnLine resource: Data

Hierarchy level: nonGeographicDataset Non geographic dataset

Other: non geographic dataset

Conformance result

Date (Publication): 2011

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: No

Conformance result

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Explanation: See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:323:0011:0102:EN:PDF

Pass: No

Statement: Trace element geochemistry was determined using quadrupole LA-ICP-MS using a Teledyne Iridia 193 nm laser connected to an Agilent 8900 ICP-MS QQQ mass spectrometer at the NHM, London. A suite of 40 elements were acquired for rutile and 47 elements for apatite. Rutile and apatite grains were located using TESCAN TIMA maps imported into the Chromium 3.1 software. Ablation was performed using a fluence of 3.5 J/cm2 repetition rate of 5 Hz. Background signal was measured for 30s followed by 30s of acquisition time. A 20 µm spot size was used for rutile and 25 µm for apatite dictated by the grain sizes in the samples. Stoichiometric values for Ti47 (59.95 wt.%) and Ca43 (38.5 wt.%) were used as internal standards for rutile and apatite, respectively. Mass spectrometer calibration was conducted using the NIST610 glass standard for rutile and NIST612 for apatite (Jochum et al., 2011). Reference materials BCR-2G and GSD-1G were analysed as secondary standards to evaluate the reproducibility of the data. Literature values used for each glass standard were downloaded from the GEOREM database (Jochum et al., 2011). Rutile mineral references materials R10b, R13 (Luvizotto et al., 2009a) and R632 (Axelsson et al., 2018) and the Durango apatite standard (Chew et al., 2016) were run as unknowns to monitor accuracy and precision. Standard-sample bracketing using these reference materials was performed after ~10 unknown analyses. Data processing and reduction was performed using an offline Microsoft Excel VBA spreadsheet. Signals containing mineral inclusions, notable contamination or low signal-noise ratio were omitted from the final spreadsheet.