oa Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Discovery of the Platiniferous Merensky Reef

The Merensky Reef is a thin layer of igneous rock in the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, which, with an underlying layer, the Upper Group 2 chromitite, contains 75 per cent of the world’s known platinum resources. It was discovered in September 1924 by Hans Merensky, and by early 1926 had been traced for about 150 km. However, large-scale mining of the reef did not develop until a proliferation of uses for the platinum group metals in the 1950s increased demand and price. Successful extraction of metal from the Upper Group 2 chromitite had to wait until the 1970s for metallurgical developments.