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Location: 24 km W from Drogheda, Ireland
Knockumber House, Knockumber Road, WhistlemountNavanIrelandC15 NH63
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The Navan Orebody is a world-class carbonate-hosted Zn-Pb deposit comprising complex tabular lenses within Lower Carboniferous limestones and excluding depletion, would be over 130Mt in size. Detailed descriptions of the geology are available in a number of publications of which Ashton et al., (2015) is the most recent. The discovery of the Tara Deep satellite and outline geology are summarized in Ashton et al., (2018).Central Ireland comprises generally flat lying sequences of Lower Carboniferous limestones with common inliers of sedimentary Lower Palaeozic and Devonian rocks. The limestones are cut by numerous, locally syn-depositional NW to ENE trending major normal faults and these control the location of several carbonate hosted Zn-Pb deposits, of which Navan is by far the largest.In eastern Ireland, the Carboniferous Limestones are part of the Dublin Basin, a significant feature that after extensional basin-margin faulting and later Hercynian inversion, exposes some large Lower Paleozoic inliers at its margins and exhibits some outliers of Namurian and later Permo-Triassic sediments. The Navan Orebody is located on the footwall (northern) side of a major south-dipping normal fault that constitutes a basin margin controlling feature. The orebody itself is controlled by a complex array of Lower Carboniferous normal faulting and slides on the uplifted footwall of this major fault. The orebody generally dips at about 10-15 degrees to the WSW and comprises several, locally stacked, tabular stratiform to stratabound lenses, oriented in general concordance with the host limestones. The mineralisation ranges from a few meters to over 70m in vertical thickness. A major slide and overlying debris flow cuts the orebody obliquely and is also mineralized. The orebodies are effectively masked from the surface by a thick succession of deep-water calc-turbidites that comprise the Dublin Basin infill sequence.Although there are number of significant lenses and fault blocks at Navan, >95% of the mineralisation occurs as sphalerite and galena in partly dolomitized limestones as complexly-textured replacements, veining and open-space infill where Zn:Pb ratios are typically around 4 or 5 to 1. Gangue mineralisation comprises subsidiary calcite, pyrite, marcasite, dolomite and barite. The remainder of the mineralisation occurs as massive pyritic lenses containing sphalerite and galena hosted by debris-flow conglomerates that overlie the deposit. This material contains often abundant fine-grained pyrite which has the potential of degrading the normally excellent metallurgy if not blended with normal run of mine ore.
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