Workin' in a gold mine....

My shift starts with a leisurely 4.30am ride to the airport on a Thursday morning, where my commute to work begins via Qantas jet. My office... the Australian outback!



Working hard (or hardly working) in the office

 I live and work at Mt Monger Station, previously a farm, which is about a 40 minute drive from the nearest town called Kalgoorlie. It's a bit of a one-horse town (it comes with its own high street of wild west-styled buildings) but as far as mining towns go it's pretty good. The offices we are based in are essentially portacabins- metal boxes which are much like an oven in the 40 degree summer heat and a fridge/freezer during the depths of winter. Currently it's a bit crowded and sometimes I'm allowed a desk (but rarely a working computer).

My main job is as the company geophysicist (in training), which means that I coordinate all upcoming geophysics surveys for all the different projects here. Geophysical surveys measure energy (either from a natural source like an earthquake or a man-made source like an electrical probe) that travels through the ground, and from that energy we can interpret what we think the ground looks like beneath the surface. This helps the project geologists as often they cannot tell what rock types are beneath the surface unless they drill it, which is usually more expensive than doing a geophysics survey. This also means I am looking after $100,000's worth of surveys (no biggy!).



Collecting rock samples for analysis in the field



When I am not pretending to be a geophysicist, I help out the geologists with their work. There are 4 exploration projects currently, each with 2 geologists, and each project looks after 10-15 different targets in which they are looking for an economic gold deposit. We use lots of different techniques to find gold, including doing soil samples, undertaking geophysical surveys, and completing drill programs to identify structures and rock bodies that hold gold. Quite often the gold is not visible in the rocks, but is mixed with other chemicals so we actually need to look for a large number of signals to see if there is gold!



The area in which we are searching for gold is called the goldfields, so there is gold pretty much everywhere. However there are a lot of factors that dictate whether or not we dig that gold up. For example, we might find a large pot of gold in the middle of nowhere, but if there is not a place to process the gold nearby then we would have to set up all the infrastructure and the mill to actually produce the gold. We would only do that if there was so much gold that we could still make a profit.



Summer thunderstorms



That, in a nutshell, is what I do as an exploration geologist working for a gold mining company. It is fun and exciting and terrifying all at the same time, and every day is new and different and long. But the enormous outback storms and the friendly resident lizard Frank and the fact I don't have to cook or clean for myself makes the 70 hour working week worthwhile!