S Alipour; B Hosseinzade; Y Rahimsouri
Abstract
Khanik-Gazan titanium potential is located at 82 km northwest of Urmia at the extremity of NW of Sanandaj-Sirjan geological zone. This deposit has formed in the Qazan mafic-ultramafic intrusive complex that intruded into the early Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. It consist ...
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Khanik-Gazan titanium potential is located at 82 km northwest of Urmia at the extremity of NW of Sanandaj-Sirjan geological zone. This deposit has formed in the Qazan mafic-ultramafic intrusive complex that intruded into the early Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. It consist of two general rock units including 1) mafic unit as the main outcrop volume and 2) ultramafic unit in smaller volume. The mafic rock type is gabbro in general formed of medium grained and layered accompanying by anorthosite sill and microgabbro (diabase). Layered mela and meso-gabbro are the main host rocks for titanium mineralisation in the studied area. The main minerals of the host rock included clinopyroxene (mainly augite), and calcic plagioclases. Opaque minerals and rarely olivine and apatite are the minor minerals and tremolite-actinolite, epidote, zoisite, chlorite, albite, sericite and calcite are the secondary minerals. Saussuritization, uralitization, sericitization and chloritization are the main alterations of main silicate minerals. Ilmenite, titanomagnetite, magnetite, and some hematite and pyrrhotite are the main primary opaque ore minerals. Open-space filling textures including granular and exsolution are the major textures of the ore, while, Spherical, martitization, mylonitization are the minor textures. Total abundance of ilmenite, magnetite, titanomagnetite in the studied polished sections ranges between 5 to 12 vol%. Oxide and silicate phases are associated with the host rocks due to the relatively low oxygen fugacity, which don’t occurred in complete separation of the silicate melt from oxide melt. Based on geochemical studies, the primary magma had revealed an alkaline to sub-alkaline (mainly tholeitic trend) series. According to the mineralogical and petrographical evidences and chemical analyses, the Khanik-Qazan ilmenite-titanomagnetite deposit is similar to the low grade apatite- ilmenite–magnetite Kauhajarvi and Lumikangas deposits, in western Finland.
