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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The Specific Gravity (SG) of a substance is a measure of its density. It is expressed as the ratio of the weight of a given volume of the substance compared to the weight of an equal volume of a reference substance – usually water [1] . An […]
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Measurement of planar structure such as a bedding plane a vein or a cleavage in oriented diamond drill core can be done in two ways. The simplest way is to set up the core in its original orientation by means of a core frame and then measure […]
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MAKING SENSE OF 2D DATA – PART 2: FOLDS This post is the second of three parts and describes the different appearances which folds can have depending on the orientation of the surface on which they are exposed. Visualising complex objects in three dimensions isn’t easy, although […]
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Diamond drilling of a prospect typically goes through two phases. The required geological inputs for the two phases are different. The first phase comprises initial exploration drilling ‑ the target generation and target drilling exploration stages. In these stages drilling is aimed primarily at a geological understanding […]
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Ore bodies are created, not found There is a widespread belief amongst people outside our profession that all ore bodies that have yet to be found already exist. They are imagined as out there, ready-made by nature, waiting for some lucky prospector or mining company to stumble […]
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Here’s a geological mystery. The impossible diamond drill hole - a drill hole drilled where no hole could possibly be drilled. I can offer no really satisfactory explanation, although there must of course be one. Perhaps readers can think of one for themselves. A few years ago I was […]
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