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Abstract
The platiniferous Merensky Reef was discovered on the farm Maandagshoek in the Bushveld Complex in August 1924. A
historical review of these events is presented, based partly on an unpublished report and a map by Dr Hans Merensky. It has
been supposed that Merensky first traced the platinum to discordant ultramafic pipes. However, a re-examination of the
topography and river systems in the area shows that this was not possible. A stream sediment study from this area has been
undertaken to determine the source of the platinum originally panned at the discovery site. Determination of the Pt:Pd:Au ratio
in these samples indicates a strong similarity with ratios in the Merensky Reef, and is completely different from the ratio found
in the pipes, which are deficient in Pd and Au. These ratios also suggest that weathering and transportation has occurred
predominantly due to physical rather than chemical processes. Two platinum-group element anomalies in the stream sediments
are found upstream from the Merensky Reef outcrops. This results from a change in the fluvial system due to Pliocene to recent
up warping with a reversal in flow direction. 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
Keywords: platinum; Merensky Reef; stream sediments; history; recent uplift
1. Introduction
There have been previous reviews (Lombaard, 1945,
1996a,b; Bartholomew et al., 1989; Worst, 1991; Wedepohl, 1995) of the history of the discovery of the
Merensky Reef (Fig. 1). However, the development of
the geological database and exploration strategy used by
Dr Merensky has never been investigated. While such
an undertaking might seem presumptuous, especially 75
years after the event, an examination of three infrequently referenced articles (Merensky, 1925, 1926;
Wagner, 1925a), two of which were published within
six months of the discovery, and a recently discovered
unpublished company report by Merensky (1924),
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R.G. Cawthorn / Journal of Geochemical Exploration 72 (2001) 5969
Fig. 1. General geological map of the Bushveld Complex. The three best mineralised ultramafic pipes occur on Driekop, Mooihoek and Onverwacht. Note the close proximity
between the pipes and the Merensky Reef, shown by dashed line denoted Pt. (Pprus is the town of Potgietersrus.)
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Fig. 2. Map of the farm Maandagshoek, adapted from the unpublished report of Merensky (1924), including the geological data of Gain (1985)
and the authors geomorphological observations. (The original, previously unpublished map by Merensky is shown on the front cover of the S.
Afr. J. Geol., 102(3), 1999.) The locality of the first platinum panned by Lombaard, the subsequently panned localitites, and the discovery site
of the Merensky Reef are shown. The Mooihoek and Driekop platiniferous pipes are shown as the shaded oval hills immediately east and north
of the Maandagshoek boundaries. Sample localities taken in this study are shown as open circles if PGE were detected, and as solid circles if
below detection limit.
layered rocks of the Critical Zone (Fig. 1). The occurrence on Onverwacht, which was to become the richest source of platinum (Fig. 1), was only discovered
by F.W. Blaine on 10th October (Wagner, 1925a; p.
91). However, as of early September 1924 nobody had
realised that the Mooihoek (and Onverwacht and
Driekop) occurrences were actually pipes discordant bodies cutting across the layering in the Critical
Zone. Merensky (article dated 10th January, 1925)
referred to the mineralisation as occurring along the
Kopje Line (Kopje being Afrikaans for small, domical hill). It is explicit in that article, and the report by
63
Fig. 3. Copy of the cross-section produced by Wagner and Mellor (1925) of the Mooihoek pipe, as understood in early 1925. By the time their
paper was published, they added in a footnote that this geometry was incorrect, and that the platinum-bearing rock (dunite or serpentinite) did
not define a concordant layer. The solid lines refer to the cross-section drawn by Wagner and Mellor (1925) the dashed lines indicate the
subsequent interpretation of the geology based on mining (Wagner, 1929).
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Fig. 4. Geomorphological map of the area. There are two long, north-trending valleys from the Steelpoort River in the south as far as the Atok
Platinum Mine. Prior to epirogenic uplift, these rivers fed into the Steelpoort River, but now flow northwards, with a watershed which cuts
through the middle of Maandagshoek. The farm boundaries of Maandagshoek, which is shown in more detail on Fig. 2, are highlighted.
3. Geomorphology
It is important to comment on certain aspects of the
fluvial system and the geomorphology of the area.
Maandagshoek straddles a broad valley about 3 km
wide which trends almost due north (Fig. 4), within
which flows the Moopetsi River. To the west lie the
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Table 1
PGE contents for stream sediment samples from the farm Maandagshoek (Localities of samples are shown in Fig. 2)
Sample number
Analytical method
Pt (ppm)
Pd (ppm)
Au (ppm)
A1
C7
D2
D4
D5
D6
F5
C3
C3
C3
E2
E2
E2
D1
D1
D1
250
250
250
250
250
250
250
50
50100
100250
50
50100
100250
50
50100
100250
ICP
ICP
ICP
ICP
ICP
ICP
ICP
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
ICP-MS
0.20
0.11
0.17
0.11
0.16
0.23
0.14
0.19
0.11
0.088
0.39
0.79
0.10
0.42
0.21
0.38
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.072
0.045
0.048
0.22
0.55
0.033
0.11
0.12
0.30
0.022
0.010
0.010
0.011
0.016
0.013
0.015
0.074
0.019
0.015
0.025
0.032
0.013
0.047
0.02
0.031
valley. Hence, erosion by the original, larger, southward flowing river would have carried considerable
PGE, resulting from the decomposition of the
Merensky and Upper Group 2 chromitite Reefs as
well as the Driekop pipe.
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Fig. 5. Plot of Pt:Pd:Au ratios of stream sediment samples (encircled area) and platiniferous ore bodies (solid dots). In the inset the solid dots
refer to samples 250 mm. The three joined symbols (small, medium and large open circles) refer to the different size fractions from three
samples C3, D1, E2 (50, 50100, and 100250 mm). The solid dot, labelled UG2 is average grade for the farm Maandagshoek (Gain, 1985),
and is comparable to the average for the entire eastern Bushveld (Vermaak and van der Merwe, 2000). The composition of the Merensky Reef is
from Vermaak and van der Merwe (2000). Pipe refers to the average of analyses from the platinifereous pipes (McDonald et al., 1995).
5. Interpretation
The Merensky Reef, the UG2 chromitite and
several pipes outcrop in or near to the Moopetsi
River valley, and so the originally panned platinum
could have come from any of these sources. However,
a consideration of the Pt:Pd:Au ratios allows a distinction to be made between these different sources.
Based on the reports from Merensky (1925), and the
interpretation given above, it was inferred that he had
concluded that the presence of Au in the originally
panned sample was a crucial fingerprint of the main
PGE mineralisation. He had not found any Au in any
of the samples taken from the Driekop and Mooihoek
pipes, and so realised that there had to be a different
source for the Au. This hypothesis can be tested more
rigorously with the stream sediment analyses, plotted
on Fig. 5. Data for Pt, Pd and Au for the pipes have
been presented by McDonald et al. (1995). Their data
base is relatively small, but all analyses indicate minimal Pd and Au. Of particular importance is the relative absence of Au. This conclusion is born out by all
the petrographic studies on samples from all of the
pipes, because no reference has ever been made to
any Au being present in any of these descriptions
(Tarkian and Stumpfl, 1975; Stumpfl and Rucklidge,
1982; Rudashevsky et al., 1992; Lee, 1996).
Analyses of Pt, Pd and Au for the Merensky Reef
and UG2 chromitite have recently been compiled for
the entire Bushveld Complex by Vermaak and van der
Merwe (2000). They reported average values of Pt, Pd
and Au of 58, 30 and 7% for Merensky Reef and 39,
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6. Conclusions
The details of the history of Merenskys discovery
of the major platinum layer in the Bushveld Complex
as previously published may be significantly in error.
Conventionally, it has been reported that the tracing of
small nuggets of Pt in streams led to the discovery of a
discordant ultrabasic pipe on the farm Mooihoek, rich
in platinum. A re-examination of the topography of
the area shows that the mineralised pipe lies outside
the present-day drainage basin of the stream where the
original alluvial platinum was panned.
The second misinterpretation is that the Mooihoek
and other similar bodies were initially considered to
Acknowledgements
I thank the Merensky Trust for access to and permission to publish information and diagrams from their
69
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