Bingham District (Rose Canyon)

The Bingham District, northern Utah is home to one of the world’s most renowned Cu-Au-Mo porphyry deposits formed from an intrusion of primarily quartz monzonite, with minor “biotite porphyry” and one example of a minette dyke. Rose Canyon, ~10 km to the southeast, is host to a sequence of alkaline mafic eruptives correlating temporally with the ore body. The canyon is thought to represent the “toe” of a composite volcano centred over the Bingham intrusions. The sequence varies between 100 and 350 m thick, composed of nine individual block and ash flows. These carry a heterogenous range of clasts including scoriaceous latite, latite, minette, and flows of melanephelinite, shoshonite, and olivine latite in addition to the dacite and trachyte which dominate in the area. Dacite and trachyte at Rose Canyon, as well as the plutonics at Bingham Canyon show geochemical and textural evidence of mixing with an alkaline mafic magma, cited as a possible mechanism for enhancing the enrichment of metals within the Bingham Canyon ore deposit. Geochemical data for both Rose Canyon and Bingham Canyon, including whole rock major and trace element, mineral chemical, and Sr-Nd isotopic, along with information on stratigraphy of Rose Canyon can be found in Maughan et al. (2002).