Apatite and zircon geochemistry deciphers difference in the nature of ore-forming magma in the Bangpu porphyry Mo-Cu deposit, Tibet

The Bangpu deposit, located in the eastern part of the Gangdese Porphyry Copper Belt, Tibet, is a porphyry Mo-Cu deposit in a continental collisional orogenic belt. Cu and Mo mineralization occurred separately in the Bangpu deposit. Mo (Cu) mineralization occurred mainly in the monzogranite porphyry (MP), while Cu (Mo) mineralization occurred mainly in the diorite porphyry (DP). The cause of such spatial differences in Cu and Mo mineralization in the Bangpu deposit remains unclear. In this study, the mineral chemistry of apatite and zircon was investigated to reveal the differences in the nature of ore-forming magma between Cu (Mo) and Mo (Cu) mineralization in the Bangpu deposit. The chondrite-normalized REE patterns of the apatite grains from the MP were enriched in LREEs with negative Eu anomalies, whereas those from the DP and biotite monzonitic granite (BM) had strong negative Eu anomalies with no obvious differentiation between LREEs and HREEs. The DP, MP, and BM have a low TTiZ range from 657 °C to 917 °C and a high AST range from 687 °C to 1079 °C. The zircon grains from the DP and MP had different Th/U ratios and TTiZ values, indicating that these porphyry samples probably experienced different magma crystallization or crystal fractionation histories. The zircon Ce4+/Ce3+ and Eu/Eu* ratios indicate that the ore-bearing DP and MP have higher oxygen fugacity than the BM. The F, Cl, and S contents in the apatite showed that the DP magmas were Cl- and S- rich, whereas the MP magmas magmas were F- and S- rich. The Bangpu porphyry Mo-Cu deposit results from two superimposed magmatic-hydrothermal systems. Mo was mainly partitioned into the F-rich magmatic-hydrothermal system released from the MP, and Cu was mainly partitioned into the Cl-rich magmatic-hydrothermal system released from the DP. Our results show that zircon and apatite geochemistry can be used to explain the spatial distribution of Cu and Mo mineralization in porphyry Cu-Mo systems.