Aynak : a world-class sediment-hosted copper deposit, Afghanistan

The Aynak copper deposit, located 30 km south of Kabul in Afghanistan, was discovered by Soviet geologists in the 1970s. Extensive exploration undertaken in the area between 1974-80 included several hundred boreholes, seventy trenches and nine exploratory adits. This delineated several large ore bodies and smaller lenses with a total “drill-indicated resource” of 240 Mt at 2.3% Cu (ESCAP, 1995). The mineralisation at Aynak consists of disseminated bornite and chalcopyrite, mainly concentrated in a stratabound orebody in a cyclic succession of metamorphosed dolomites, marls, siltstones and carbonaceous pelites. A model proposes Cu was leached from underlying volcanic rocks and flowed up faults to deposit Cu sulphides into overlying sediments.