June Speaker: “Tectonic Growth of the North American Craton & Its Associated Mineral Endowment,” by Patrick Rowe

by Cindy Schmidtlein, MSDC Vice President

Our speaker for June is Patrick Rowe who will talk to us about tectonic growth of the North American craton and the role that continental accretion plays in the availability of minerals forming ore deposits.

Speaker Bio

Patrick Rowe holds several engineering degrees, all of which include a strong basis in geology and earth sciences. He worked at the Nevada Test Site for almost 25 years in mining and drilling operations for both weapons testing and waste disposal the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository site. Patrick is considered one the world’s foremost experts in shaft drilling. He spent the last 14 years working for the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Project Engineer.

Patrick has been collecting rocks and minerals for more than 40 years and leads geology field trips for the Parajito Environmental Center and Future Rockhounds of America Pebble Pups Program. He is the currently the Vice-President for Field Trips for the Los Alamos Geological Society and has an impressive record of helping people and giving back to the community.

Presentation Topic

Patrick’s talk, Tectonic Growth of the North American Craton & Its Associated Basement Mineral Endowment, will discuss the role that continental accretion plays in the availability of minerals forming ore deposits. His presentation will pull together the story of craton assembly and accretion from the Precambrian period (~2 billion years ago) to the present using a series of time-slice maps and discuss how this craton assembly and accretion has influenced our mineral endowment.

Extent of Laurentia. Redrawn and adapted from the U.S. Geological Survey.

He also will discuss mineral deposit systems in the context of whether they were formed (1) as part of the primary tectonic setting of basement domains, (2) by processes that thickened the original crust to form continental crust, or (3) in special cases, during multiple reactivations of crust and structures by younger, superposed orogenic events.

Note: Patrick Rowe may be a familiar name to our readers. He spoke to our group in October 2022 in a talk with the intriguing title: "Silver: Born of Cataclysmic Events and Brought to Us by Improbable Happenings." You can find a synopsis of that talk HERE.