Preprint accepted at Nature Geoscience on 15th May 2020 and made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. c 2020 Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability Mark J. Hoggard,∗,a,b Karol Czarnota,∗,c,d Fred D. Richards,a,e David L. Huston,c A. Lynton Jaques,d & Sia Ghelichkhand aDepartment of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, USA. bLamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA. cGeoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia. dResearch School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. eDepartment of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London, UK. ∗ www.mjhoggard.com; mark
[email protected];
[email protected] Cite as: Hoggard, M.J., K. Czarnota, F.D. Richards, D.L. Huston, A.L. Jaques, & S. Ghelichkhan (2020). Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability, Nature Geoscience, 13(7), 504–510. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0593-2 Sustainable development and the transition to a clean-energy economy drives ever-increasing demand for base metals, substantially outstripping the discovery rate of new deposits and necessitating dramatic im- provements in exploration success. Rifting of the continents has formed widespread sedimentary basins, some of which contain large quantities of copper, lead and zinc. Despite over a century of research, the geological structure responsible for the spatial distribution of such fertile regions remains enigmatic. Here, we use statistical tests to compare deposit locations with new maps of lithospheric thickness, which outline the base of tectonic plates. We find that 85% of sediment-hosted base metals, including all giant deposits (>10 megatonnes of metal), occur within 200 km of the transition between thick and thin lithosphere.