Gold and other minor elements associated with the hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, supplemented with data from Steamboat Springs, Nevada

A commonly held theory of the origin of epithermal ore deposits relates Au, Ag, Hg, As, Sb, Tl, and other "volatile" elements to "fossil" hot-spring systems that transported and deposited these metallic elements close to the ground surface existing at the time. In the early 1970's, an emission-spectrographic method using short-wavelength radiation (SWR) was developed for use in the analysis of these "volatile" elements. This method was applied to 125 samples of rock and hot-spring chemical precipitates from Yellowstone National Park and 43 samples from Steamboat Springs, Nev. The results of those analyses are presented here. Recently, other, more sensitive methods for the analyses of gold and volatile elements have been developed and (or) become less expensive, but these methods generally have not yet been applied to Yellowstone samples. -- First paragraph.