Proof positive, miners are under water!
January 10, 1998
Yep, us miners are under water folks. Today's paper had an article that had been published in the New York Times, so you know it is true. In that article it was revealed that two Australian businessmen started a company (Nautilus Minerals Corp) to mine under the sea.
Down under and under some more. They plan to sample and later mine in or should I say below the territorial waters of Papua, New Guinea. They want to mine where there are ancient and still active water chimneys of hydrothermal and high temperature gaseous vents producing mineralization. The values are spread out along the sea floor. There are strange tube worms and blind fish down there. And there are other strange creatures too. Sample ores are up to 26% zinc, 15% copper, 7oz of silver per ton and 1 ounce of gold per ton. They didn't mention all of the manganese and PGMs that also are present in some of these vents. Oh my, oh my!
Well here is my contribution of what little I understand about the subject. Bob's deposit in Wyoming is such a deposit. It was deposited under the sea and is now lifted out of the seas by continental building processes. Other land deposits like this exist and are being mined today. Now years ago I worked on a project with a Dr Parker, formerly of the Oceanic Institute. He had been researching in the sea bed deposits also. That work was privately and government funded to look into the feasibility of these deposits. As you remember, Howard Hughs was into this one. According to oral communication and reports that I have by Dr Parker (somewhere) that discuss this research, Dr. Parker provided some of the research ideas that fit these deposits. They are extremely difficult to mine, to process and the gold and PGMs that are proven to be there are reported by only the most sophisticated of analytical assay methods. Folks, we are talking about Desert Dirt here; but maybe that is the wrong terminology. If the deposits are covered with water, can they be desert dirt? They are not in deserts by my thesaurus. But that brought up some old thoughts that were proposed at the time by Dr. Parker and others. Dr. Parker said that these deposits are on the extensions of continental lineaments that were part of the continental building blocks. He also stated that portions of these lineaments were often lifted onto land. The metals that were more mobile were dispersed throughout the surrounding sediments as diluted lower grade resources, but the PGMs, gold and silver were left residual in those sediments because of their inert natures and insolubility. That kind of talk came from research paid by hundreds of millions of dollars of your taxpayer money. The joke at the time was, we couldn't process these resources on the lands where they are cheap to mine and here we go to the sea. And besides, the ones on the land have often been depleted of their arsenic, sulfur and other toxic constituents by weathering related leaching processes. Why would you want to dredge up that toxic waste problem from the sea and put it upon the land? Oh shucks, maybe I am just a country boy from Colorado, far away from the seas. What should we know about big city coastal common sense? After all, our sediments in Colorado are remnants of seas that developed at and before the times of the dinosaurs. We only see seas in the movies.
But lets use Dr Parker's conclusions a little further. An example is a major continental building fault that exhibits the scars of deep sea venting called the Walker Lane Lineament. According to Dr Parker, the most favorable places to see evidence of this venting on land is in regional smashed zones where one of these lineaments joins into another lineament or attempts to cross another lineament. The intersection area for hundreds of square miles becomes a real smashed up permeable vent. At those locations the big volcanic histories were most aggressive; and so was the deep sea venting. The Walker Lane Lineament starts out in the Pacific in the North West. It passes against the South Western edge of the Colorado Plateau at an area around Meadview, Arizona. Ho ho, a lot of Desert Dirt in that part of Mojave county. There were prospectors that could run dry washers clean up into the 1960s and support their families with the gold nuggets they produced from that area. And cluster resources including lead, zinc and copper are there too. Good guess Dr Parker. From there, Walker Lane continues South to the Tucson area. There it crosses what is called the Texas Lineament. That lineament is an Easterly striking feature. IPM, GPGI and other DD companies are strategically located in that area of the desert. The Texas lineament goes on East and through Arkansas. Desert dirt mineralization has been confirmed along the entire extent of that trend as has more localized conventional copper, great gobs of manganese and DD precious metals. That lineament crosses a North/South lineament that to the North passes through the tri-state zinc district. And there is DD gold there too. Yes, Naxos is on a Continental lineament also. Oh please forgive me, I almost forgot, Tintina and Birch Mountain are on or directly adjacent to lineaments as well. So is International Gold. International Gold is on the same lineament in Idaho that passes through Yellowstone Park in Wyoming.
So why should we try to do mining under the sea when we do not mine upon the land? Now, lets try and understand the evolution of the DD regional settings. In the areas of the DDs are evidence of nodules and histories of fossils of seabed mineralization. The little iron nodules that might have been high in copper, manganese and sulfur have been destroyed by oxidation and weathering. The sulfur and arsenic are gone. The base metals including copper, lead and zinc are now dispersed throughout the zone of influence. The total range of contained values is in the uncalculated trillions. Numbers of values are so large to be unimportant except to the wild dreamer. The metals are in a most difficult range of types to process also. But here are the hard facts that will change the mining industry in the next century; the DD companies we have here today will have started the pioneering work.
Lets have a little historical review. Before my time some people were already wise to the micro-cluster distribution of metal values along these trends. Frankly, if the EPA used better analytical methods, I believe the natural mercury, lead and other metal toxins would be found to be so great in some of these areas that some cities would be declared as natural disaster sites. And the cause would be because of nature, not man. An example, I once was given a sample to test from Lac (The largest North American gold producer at the time). Their scanning electron microscope was finding significant lead values along with some copper in a prospective sedimentary rock from near a lineament in Alberta, Canada. They thought the contained lead values might be around .9% lead (18 pounds per ton lead). Current "state of the art" cheap analytical geochemistry reported around 256ppm (.5 pounds per ton lead). So I used an 1800s lead assay method that was a fire assay for lead. The ancients (before my time) used to do all assays for lead by fire assay. Lead fire assays were based on then contemporary lead smelter procedures. To my surprise I produced a lead looking bead about the size of a pea. But was it lead? I gave Lac the lead bead. They sent it to an independent lab for analysis. The bead, calculated back to the initial sample, represented 2.9% lead and .25% to .5% copper (58 pounds of lead and 5 pounds min. of copper per ton). Also detected were gold and silver in important amounts.
So let's get back to the early pioneers that saw this phenomenon. The companies that first looked at this strange group of difficult to assay and process metals did not have the scanning electron microscope as a tool. But some how they saw through a very dirty window and saw the future. The predictions were that these resources would someday replace the mines as we still know them. This new future generation of mines was called "by-product mines". In a "by-product mine there is no single metal as the target element. They didn't know about sea nodules, lineaments or micro-clusters. But the mines they were forecasting would be much richer in total values per ton that anything that was then being mined. They were a bit too early. But now I am going to upgrade my opinion of the value of the DDs as to the importance I see in them today and the way I think it is going to be.
I predict that some of the lineament-targeted deposits will soon produce copper, nickel, chromium, lead, zinc, selenium, tellurium, manganese, gold and PGMs. At first a few of the values and later all of them. This will all happen after the precious metals are being produced from these resources.
The mines will change in how they are produced. The big mining companies as we know them will die. They will join the dinosaurs. Their holes will be lakes and their mills and surface disturbances will be reclaimed. They will be gone. They will be gone because they will not change from their current ways. In protecting their massive infrastructures, they will pass away.
Many DD deposits will be developed away from the current mining targets. The desert deposits where oxidation, deep weathering and eons of time have removed the toxic constituents will be the prime targets. At first the precious metals will be targeted, but production will advance on to producing a wider number of metals and elemental resources. Someday, most non-ferrous metals will come from these mines.
The mining of relatively benign country (toxicity speaking) will allow for deep strip mines that are well above the water table. They will do the water table below no harm. The exhausted wastes will be replaced back to where they came from in similar contours to what was there originally there. The more important desert foliage will be set aside during mining, nurtured and placed back to where they had come from during reclamation.
Reclamation will be an ongoing thing. Mine an acre; replace an acre to its almost original setting. The richness of the resources with their collective values will make this possible.
When mining moves on it will not leave toxic sites in its wake.
There will be no gold mines, no copper mines, no lead mines and no zinc mines. There will just be mines. And that era will persist until metals are needed no more.
At least that is my opinion. mike |
