Altitude Minerals Podcast
EP02: Copper Gold Porphyry

In this episode, we’re talking porphyries. Porphyries are one of the more difficult mineral systems to discover, but when you do, they are among the most valuable.

Porphyry systems account for five of the world’s ten most valuable deposits. They contribute around three-quarters of the world’s copper and a fifth of its gold. But exploring for them is, as you’ll hear, a bit like detective work—piecing together clues from many different sources to build the full picture.

As followers of Altitude Minerals know, we’re currently hunting for porphyry systems in what we’ve interpreted as a northwest extension of the Macquarie Arc in New South Wales. So as we prepared for the next round of drilling, I sat down with our resident porphyry expert, Professor Bruce Schaefer—a world-leading geochemist, author and lecturer on porphyry systems—to make sense of how these systems form and the fingerprints they leave behind for explorers like us to follow.

We get into the geophysical and geochemical tools used to see through cover, why the Macquarie Arc demands far more pinpoint targeting than the big systems of Chile or Indonesia, and how we’re applying this thinking across both our Byrock and Theseus ground.

If you want to understand how a copper-gold porphyry discovery actually gets made, this one’s for you.

About the Altitude Minerals Podcast

Through the Podcast, we aim to bring our investors into the conversations we have with leading minerals experts every day, sharing the knowledge and expertise behind our exploration programs, so you can make better-informed investment decisions.