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| A drill rig: the tall vertical bit is the drill which pumps sample into the big red thing where the offsider is collecting the samples in green bags- one bag = 1m of drilled earth |
Producing gold isn't quite as easy as having the Midas Touch- it takes several years of work to go from a bare stretch of land to an operating gold mine. Firstly, if an area looks like it might have some gold, you have to acquire a licence to explore that land (it doesn't mean you own the land, and means you are only allowed to do a certain amount of work on that land).
Next, you need to make a plan about where you are going to look for gold and why. Most of the time the land that we take on has already been previously explored by another company so there are historical datasets and reports that we can look through to see what they have found before. We use this, and the geophysical data we have along with fieldwork to compose proposals about what we want to do next to further explore the area. This could be a soil sampling program, further geophysical surveys or if you are pretty sure about an area, we would propose a drill program.
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| Out doing some fieldwork in the sunshine |
Once you have chosen where you are going to look for gold, you have to get environmental and heritage clearances on that land to make sure there isn't any particular wildife of historic aboriginal sites that you will be disturbing by working there.
Depending on the size of the area the drill program could be 10 drill holes or it could be 100's, and there are multiple different types of drilling you can do depending on what the ground conditions are and what information you want to get from the drilling. The cheapest type of drilling cannot drill very deep and only produces rock chips, but it is good when you are first exploring an area to see what might be out there. Usually you don't hit the gold deposit using this type of drilling, but when gold is formed in the earth there are a lot of chemicals associated with it and from these chemicals you can judge where the gold may be at depth.
Using the information from your first pass of drilling and you have a better idea of where the gold is, you can do a second phase of drilling which still gives rock chips but can go deeper and gives you more information about the bedrock. With all drill holes, samples are sent off to the labs to test for gold and other key chemicals that could indcate gold. While you are drilling, you keep a log of what rock types there are, any structures you see and whether the rocks have been altered by chemicals.
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| Me and Vaughan on a visit to the Kalgoorlie "superpit"- the pit that keeps Kalgoorlie in business! It produces 850,000 oz gold every year, which at $1400/oz is some serios money! The bucket that I am standing on is one that's used to shift all that ore! |
If it looks like you have a really good gold deposit then you can use diamond drilling (which means the drill bits have industrial diamonds in them for strength). Diamond drilling produces a cylinder of rock that can be 100's of metres long (not all in one piece though!). From this you can clearly see the structures in the rock and the areas where the rocks have been altered- often you need both to find gold. However this is the most expensive kind of drilling, so you only use it when you know you have something good!
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| A field trip in January to learn about the local geology- 8 cars in a row! |
This whole exploration process in itself can take years and cost $100,000's, and sometimes the area you target just doesn't have enough gold in it and so it gets thrown out. But if you find a deposit that is big enough to mine, you pass that area onto the resource development team, who spend many months doing further modelling and drilling to define exactly where the gold is.
