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Mines/South Africa

Mogalakwena mine

Mogalakwena mine, South Africa. Producing, open pit, mining platinum, nickel, copper.

Why Mogalakwena is famous

Mogalakwena is a PGM mine in the Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex. In 2020 it produced 35,032 kg of PGMs, 43 per cent of Anglo American Platinum's mined PGM output and 57 per cent of its palladium. USGS notes that Northern Limb deposits tend to be richer in palladium.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Layered intrusion PGM and chromite (Bushveld type)

Mogalakwena today

Where platinum is mined todayWhere nickel is mined todayWhere copper is mined todayMining in South Africa

Where next

Mines

Same kind of depositImpala RustenburgBoth work the Bushveld Complex: Impala near Rustenburg, Mogalakwena in the Northern Limb.1

Deposit types

An example ofLayered intrusion PGM and chromite (Bushveld type)Mogalakwena belongs to the layered intrusion pgm and chromite family of deposits.3

Sources

  1. 2020-21 Minerals Yearbook, South Africa (advance release) US Geological Survey
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv (modern operations table) prospectortrails.com internal data
  3. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Pictures: South Africa: a crowd of people gathered outside The Goldfields offices in Johannesburg. 1896., Unknown (Wellcome Collection) (Public Domain Mark 1.0); NASA's ASTER Shows Brazilian City After Dam Disaster, NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain (NASA media, no copyright)); Chiquicamata Mine, Chile, NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain (NASA media, no copyright)).