Abstract
The source of the gold in Carlin-type deposits has been debated ever since this unusual gold deposit-type was first discovered in the Carlin district of Nevada (USA) more than sixty years ago, with magmatic, metamorphic, sedimentary, and hybrid sources having been proposed. The current study used scanning electron microscopy and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy to investigate the carbonaceous sedimentary rocks associated with the Baidi deposit in the Golden Triangle Carlin-type gold district of southwest China. The results indicate that these rocks contain gold nanoparticles and microparticles, and gold-bearing framboidal pyrite (mean 0.14 ppm gold; up to 0.47 ppm gold). These findings, coupled with the observations that coeval magmatism associated with gold mineralization was generally absent in the Golden Triangle district and that gold-rich carbonaceous sedimentary rocks are also present in the Carlin district, support the hypothesis that carbonaceous sedimentary rocks were the source of the gold in Carlin-type deposits.
Similar content being viewed by others
Acknowledgements
This paper congratulates Guilin University of Technology on its 70th anniversary. The manuscript was improved significantly with the help of the constructive comments of four anonymous reviewers. The authors sincerely thank Hong-Mei Yang (GIGCAS), Yuan-Yun Wen (IGCAS), Jing-Wen Zhou (GIGCAS), and Jie Wu (Guilin University of Technology) for their help with the laboratory analyses. Samples investigated in this study were collected from the Baidi gold deposit and its periphery with verbal permission. This work was supported by the Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (No. 2023GXNSFAA026357), the Eighth Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region “Bagui Scholars” Program grant to W.F., and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42202072).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Chai, M., Williams-Jones, A.E., Su, W. et al. The source of the gold in Carlin-type gold deposits. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03584-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03584-y
