It is surprising how often the least experienced geologists are handed the critical but laborious and sometimes tedious task of logging drill core. My first job in industry was with the exploration arm of a large international mining company. It involved a lot of core logging. The department was […]
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Beneath the canopy it is dark and gloomy on the forest floor, the air heavy ahead of late-afternoon rain. I am alone in a remote spot on a remote island in a remote corner of the Pacific. Three men appear from the trees behind me. They are […]
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Here’s the thing You know what Australia looks like. You would recognise it on a map: its general shape, the peninsulas, the great gulfs. You could draw it from memory, probably, and if you did, it might look something like this: Figure 1 That’s a pretty […]
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How to Salt a Gold Claim: Part 2 – Karpa Springs and Busang 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 […]
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How to Salt a Gold Claim: Part 1 – Queensland Interlude 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 […]
Read more →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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The most fundamental feature of any map is its scale. The scale of a map is the ratio of a length of a unit line on the map to the length that that line represents in the real world. The ratio is expressed as a fraction that […]
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The metals mining industry offers geologists two distinct career paths – the exploration geologist and the mining geologist. Between these roles there is an overlap of required knowledge and skills, but the job requirements are different and the personality which makes a good exploration geologist seldom makes […]
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