07/12/2020 - SEG SEMINAR 2020 with Dr. JUN COWAN

In our chapter, we invite every year a fellow SEG member to give a seminar on a relevant topic related to ore deposit geology. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, it has not been possible to hold it in person at our faculty this year - as it would have normally been done, but we have managed to carry on the tradition nonetheless! Dr Jun Cowan has been our SEG special guest for 2020.

Dr Cowan is a structural geologist renowned for being the conceptual founder of Leapfrog software. He has a broad experience in the mining sector and has worked on hundreds of deposits around the world since he joined the industry in 1999. Today, Dr Cowan works as a structural consultant in Western Australia and has recently sparked off a debate on the origin of most ancient so-called VMS deposits. In a series of publications he is posting in LinkedIn, he tries to prove, based on structural data, that many VMS deposits which have been traditionally labelled as syngenetic are actually epigenetic.

Much to our delight, the seminar, entitled “What is Deposit-scale Structural Analysis? - An interactive presentation”, was meant to introduce us to this very topic. The first part of the presentation was devoted to an interactive activity. In it, Dr Cowan used examples of case studies from around the world to encourage the listeners to be critical and to apply basic geological principles. In the second half of the seminar, each example was reviewed by our guest as he exposed his ideas on the formation of the deposit. Finally, we had our doubts answered and fell into an interesting conversation about challenging long-held views in science.

We would like to thank Jun Cowan for his time and for sharing his thoughts with us in what was a fruitful and pleasurable meeting.