A fool and his gold are not soon mined.
Soon it will be mine-soon weather.
Better to mine soon than later, when prices are higher.
A fool's gold mine is not mine.
The Moose Mine in Wawa, Ontario was a fool's gold (pyrite) mine. The produced iron and sulphur. It operated from around the turn of the century until 1920 or thereabouts.
The Rammelsberg Mine in Germany was also a fool's gold iron mine. The mine had operated since the middle ages and was still operating well into the 1980's. I believe it has closed now.
Inco in Sudbury, Ontario used to recover iron from the pyrite content of their ore.
What drive the pyrite fool's-gold mines out of business was the availibility of sulphur from oil wells, and the Frasch process, which used hot water to dissolve sulphur from subsurface solid sulphur beds. These beds were abundant in the "Salton Sea", of the SW desert of the US. Texas Gulf Sulphur was a company that made it living with the Frasch process. Before Texas Gulf went on a mine finding jamboree in the 1950's, finding the largest copper-zinc mine in the world in Timmins, Ontario, it enjoyed a steady diet of dollars from producing sulphur by drilling for it, and pumping it out of these beds.
This process was the money-engine, so to speak, that allowed this company to explore for mines so successfully on a grass roots basis. Texas Gulf was the first company to transitorize the "AM" conductivity device, so that if could be towed behind a helicopter to produce high resolution, accurate aerial surveys. This procedure allowed them to collect an impressive number of conductivity anomalies, that with this "Canadian Aero" system could be differentiated from magnetite beds, by the out of phase component, allowing a very positive ID of the conductivity anomaly. Later so-called "Input" methods used by Selco, using the time-domain principle were actually inferior, in that they would not often react to massive sulphides, and also produced conductors on the edge of large bodies of magnetite that were not differentiable from these bodies. The large numbers of spurious conductors produded by TDEM methods has resulted in a lower success rate of aerial geophysics as a reconnaisance tool since that time, despite its pervasive implementation.
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