Resumen

Potassium (K) is one of the elements that is usually added into veins and host rocks in geothermal systems, which are the systems that produce gold and silver low sulfidation epithermal deposits. The addition of K occurs by the formation of minerals such as illite and adularia; while illite may be deposited during hydrothermal alteration in the rocks that surround quartz veins, adularia, can be deposited as part of the veins. Adularia is usually interpreted as a product of adiabatic boiling, which is also one of the reasons of gold precipitation. Therefore, the concentrations of K can both assist in detecting hydrothermally altered rocks that may host mineralized veins, and to provide information about hydrothermal alterations that are difficult to recognize by geological observations. Recently, during the exploration of the Argenta project, located a few kilometers to the north of the Martha silver mine, Fomicruz acquired ground-based gamma-ray and reflectance spectroscopy data, with the aim of detecting potassium anomalies and to infer the sources of those anomalies. In this presentation, I will show preliminary interpretations of those data.