In the grey light of a tropical dawn on 6th July 1968, fifty men assembled at the government wharf, Sohano, on the south coast of Bougainville Island. They were members of the Royal Papua Nugini Constabulary, and they were armed with long wooden pick-axe handles. An […]
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Exploration for a mineral deposit begins with generating prospects which can then be tested with a staged series of exploration programs that hopefully will lead to ore discovery and eventually a mine. Obviously not all prospects that are generated will make it through to a mine. In […]
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All metal deposits that have formed later than the rocks that host them (that is, epigenetic deposits) have got there by virtue of fluid transport along faults and their location, shape, size and attitude are largely determined by the strain states that existed within the fault […]
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The beginning and the end of the Paleozoic Era are well defined by major breaks, or tipping points, in the history of life on Earth. The Era began around 540 million years ago with the “Cambrian Explosion”: the dramatic first appearance of abundant fossil remains in sedimentary […]
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Strike and dip is a convention for measuring the attitude of a planar structure, such as a bedding plane, fault, joint or vein, in terms of the angles which it makes with the geographic coordinates of the earth’s surface – north-south, east-west and up-down. You probably know […]
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Why make a geological map? Mapping epithermal gold veins along the coast of Sumbawa, Indonesia. It’s a hard life, but someone has to do it. A geological map is a graphical presentation of geological observations and interpretations on a horizontal plane[1]. A geological section is identical in […]
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Producing a geological map is a process of problem solving. One of the best ways to approach problem solving is known as the system of multiple working hypotheses. Something of a buzz phrase in all sciences nowadays, not many know that the idea was first formulated in […]
Read more →There are many, many times more prospectors and geologists exploring for mineral deposits than there are ore bodies to be found. It is entirely feasible for a competent explorationist to go through a career and never be able to claim sole credit for an economic mineral discovery. It […]
Read more →As little as ten years ago, before orienting drill core became routine, geologists hardly ever measured structures in their core. Much useful information relevant to understanding geology and hence finding and defining ore bodies was ignored. Now the tendency is to fill vast data bases with hundreds […]
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There are two ways of measuring structures in oriented diamond drill core. The first is to set up the core in a core frame (often called a “rocket launcher”) so that it lies in the same orientation as it did when it was in the ground; the […]
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