Heavy mineral deposits in the upper coastal plain of North Carolina and Virginia

Zirconium and hafnium

“…for placers lying near the coast during the Quaternary Period, but similar processes have also been cited as important in Eocene to Pliocene deposits as well (Puffer and Cousminer, 1982;Carpenter and Carpenter, 1991;Hou and others, 2011).…”

NURE geochemical and geophysical surveys: Defining prospective terranes for United States placer exploration

“…Prominent NURE Ti-Zr anomalies in southern Virginia and central to northern North Carolina Tertiary sediments along the Fall Zone outline the general area of recent discoveries of heavy-mineral deposits (Berquist, 1987;Carpenter and Carpenter, 1991;Hoffman and Carpenter, 1992). Studies of aeroradiometric anomalies near the North Carolina-South Carolina State line by Owens and others (1990) show that sediments nearest the Fall Zone have the strongest radioactivity and that the regional intensity of the radioactivity decreases toward the coast.…”

Titanium mineral resources in heavy-mineral sands in the Atlantic coastal plain of the southeastern United States

“…Heavy-mineral sands in the western parts of the coastal plain of Virginia and northern North Carolina are interpreted to be Pliocene sedimentary deposits that formed during worldwide transgression-regression events between 3.5 and 3.0 Ma (Carpenter and Carpenter, 1991).…”

“…The northern end of this belt includes the previously mentioned Old Hickory deposit, located 60 km south of Richmond, Virginia, and the belt's southern end includes deposits located west of Wilson, N.C. (fig. 1) (Carpenter and Carpenter, 1991). On the basis of heavy-mineral estimates for 19 deposits within this belt, Carpenter and Carpenter (1991) calculated a total (semiquantitative) regional resource of 22.7 million metric tons of heavy minerals in 377.8 million metric tons of sand, with an average heavy-mineral content of 6 percent.…”