Porphyry Copper Deposits in the American Southwest: Tucson to Globe-Miami, Arizona July19-23, 1989

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Field Trip Guidebooks Series.

Welcome to Tucson, Arizona, and the four-day stay to visit and study a group of classic copper deposits. The field trip comprises four, single-day, excursions to copper districts during which you will have the opportunity to spend time in a region with a unique geological history, and to examine the geology of a selected group of distinctive and different porphyry copper deposits.
In outline, the four trips will be carried out from Tucson to visit the deposits in southeastern Arizona at Silver Bell, Red Mountain, the Globe-Miami-Ray region and in the Pima district. A map of this part of Arizona with mines, ranges, and routes is shown in Figure 1. The visit to this group of deposits will allow the study of parts of porphyry copper deposits from altered and oxidized lithocaps downward into metallized systems where both sedimentary and crystalline rocks host the metals and alteration. Further, the location of these deposits and the routes traveled will afford a sightseer's view of parts of two of the major geomorphic provinces of the State of Arizona, the Basin and Range Province in the Sonoran Desert, and the Central Mountain Province, which marks the geomorphic and geological transition between the Basin and Range region to the south and the Colorado Plateaus to the north.