Deposit Types
Frontier Lithium’s target or deposit model is the highly evolved, granitic, rare-element lithium-cesium-tantalum bearing (LCT) complex type, petalite subtype pegmatite. The Tanco pegmatite situated in the Bird River belt in southeastern Manitoba is the best known and a world-class example of this type of deposit model.
Of the five classes, the rare-element class is the group with the most attractive economic potential and can represent economic sources of tantalum, ceramic grade spodumene, rubidium, and the main cesium ore mineral, pollucite.The lithium rich, rare-element pegmatites are not common and comprise <0.1% of the total known pegmatites (Kesler, et al, 2012).
The rare-element class of granitic pegmatites is generated by the differentiation of fertile, S-type granitic plutons. This differentiation process of the parental granite is accompanied by the progressive accumulation of lithophile rare-elements as well as elements such as thallium, tantalum, hafnium, gallium, germanium, boron, fluorine, and phosphorus (Cerný and Ercit, 2005). The pegmatite field results when the lithophile rare-element enriched residual melt is expelled from the fertile granite and assuming suitable channels exist migrates outward and upward away from the granite.A field can be comprised of many pegmatites over a distance of a few kilometres from the source granite. The field itself shows an increasing fractionation moving away from the source granite.< ........
