Southern China's manganese resource assessment: An overview of resource status, mineral system, and prediction model

Manganese is, an important industrial mineral used in the manufacture of various products, including in the refinement of iron ore and as an alloy in steel. China has rich resources of manganese (Mn), with the majority of deposits located in southern China. The common types of Mn deposits are sedimentary, hydrothermally modified, and supergene. Exploring a suitable method to quantitatively assess the Mn mineral resources at the craton-scale is, therefore, an open challenge for the geologist. The purpose of this contribution is to present a framework for the region-scale assessment of manganese based on mineral-system analysis and the model-based synthetic volume method. The framework involves: (1) summarising the status of Mn resources in regions of southern China considered to be prospective for the metal; (2) constructing datasets based on mineral exploration; (3) completion of mineral-system analysis of Mn deposits in each prospective area; (4) establishing a prediction model based on mineral-system analysis; (5) construction of geographic information system (GIS) layers to represent the mineralisation processes; (6) using a mathematical model to conduct a spatial analysis of areas considered to be prospective; (7) estimation of mineral resources based on the synthetic volume method; and (8) delineation of “minimum potential area” (MPA) and the calculation of the total predicted resources. The innovations of this research are the translation of the ore-forming processes into mappable features in the geosciences datasets by applying the concept of mineral system, and quantitative assessment of the Mn mineral resources based on the assumption that the larger the volume of a trap, the more resources it probably holds. This framework was used for China's “National Mineral Resources Assessment Initiative” in recent years, and help to assess the Mn mineral resources at the craton-scale, and determine the critical characteristic of the Mn deposits that can be used for the construction of model-based prospectivity mapping, especially in southern China, which can be used for manganese exploration.