The development of the Scientific Method was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The method is based on three pillars: reproducible evidence, deductive reasoning, and hypotheses that can be tested by experiment. It freed scientists from the introspection, preconception, prejudice and […]
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Over the summer of 1969-70, I was based for five months in the remote former gold mining town of Nullagine, in the Pilbara region of NW Western Australia. The local indigenous people were the Martu tribe. Several extended family groups had a semi-permanent camp on the dry […]
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The town of Nullagine, in the Pilbara region in the northwest of Western Australia, is situated 1400 km NNE OF the State capital Perth, where the old Great Northern Highway crosses the broad, dry, sandy bed of the Nullagine River. The town was established following gold discovery […]
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Climate change: naming of parts Reed, Henry. “Naming of Parts.” New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92. NAMING OF PARTS To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, […]
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Is there such a thing as a geological fact map? Can we justify the widely used term ground truth to describe such a map, or indeed any direct geological field observation? This is not just a question of semantics. Surface indications of ore are usually subtle, and […]
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In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title is self-explanatory, the book became a classic, still in print today. Mackay’s examples demonstrate the corruption of religion and capitalism, but today’s crowd madness is more likely […]
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In my previous post I described my encounter in 1984 with claim salting (or at least, alleged salting). These were early days, the late 20th Century gold boom was still young, and claim salting considered a rather amusing but small-scale misdemeanour practised by dishonest small-time prospectors – […]
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Looking through a box of my old field notebooks the other day I came across one which contained a cartoon sketch I had made of an old Queensland prospector and remembered the story behind it. In 1984, as an employee of a multinational mining company, I was […]
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TARGETING DRILL HOLES It is a truism that ore bodies are rare and hard to locate. If this were not so, they would hardly be worth finding. Explorers search for them by drilling holes into the ground. A single drill hole produces a very small sample […]
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The Three Point Problem In the previous post I described how quantitative orientation data can be collected from non-oriented core from a single drill hole. In this post, techniques for collecting orientation data on planes are described when more than one non-oriented hole is available from a […]
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