Geological Methods in Mineral Exploration and Mining ebook is available to be downloaded here now.
- Title: Geological Methods in Mineral Exploration and Mining
- Author: Roger Marjoribanks
- Publisher: Springer
- Pages: 248
This book is written as a practical field manual to be used by geologists engaged in mineral exploration. It is also hoped that it will serve as a text and reference for students in Applied Geology courses of universities and colleges. The book aims to outline some of the practical skills that turn the graduate geologist into an explorationist. It is intended as a practical “how to” book, rather than as a text on geological or ore deposit theory.
An explorationist1 is a professional, usually a geologist, who searches for ore bodies in a scientific and structured way. Mineral exploration professionals include a range of people: business people involved in financial and entrepreneurial activities in the mining industry, board members and company management no longer involved in day to day exploration but often with past hands-on experience, technical assistants, tenement managers, environmental and safety personnel, drillers, surveyors, IT specialists, geophysicists and geochemists, ore reserve specialists, various types of consultants, and the exploration geologists.
Typically the exploration geologists are the jacks-of-all-trades with an overview of the team and the project. Although explorationist is a somewhat awkward and artificial term, this is the only available word to describe the totality of the skills that are needed to locate and define economic mineralization. Even the mine geologist, attempting to define ore blocks ahead of the mining crews, is an explorationist. The most fundamental and cost-effective skills of the explorationist relate to the acquisition, recording and presentation of geological knowledge so that it can be used to predict the presence of ore– these are the skills that are the subject of this book. Practical field techniques taught at undergraduate level are often forgotten and sometimes, although taught, are not reinforced by subsequent practice; some skills that the explorationist needs may never be adequately taught in the academic environment of universities.