The mineralogy hidden in your assays with Scott Halley

This month on GeOCHemISTea, Sam sits down with Scott Halley to talk about extracting meaningful mineralogy from standard four-acid assay data. Scott walks through how the classic MINSQ approach evolved into modern linear-programming methods that handle solid solutions, honor thermodynamics, and produce fast, first-pass mineralogy models.They also dig into ambiguity in geologic interpretation, “cognitive entrenchment” in porphyry systems, and how linking calculated mineralogy to rock physics is helping bridge the gap between geochemistry and geophysics.For this episode we read: MINSQ - a least squares spreadsheet method for calculating mineral proportions from whole rock major element analyses (Herrmann and Berry, 2002)