Gold exploration success

Abstract

Discovery of a goldfield is a rare and difficult event, which contrasts with the normal outcome of exploration that is non-discovery. As there are many gold provinces globally and numerous discoveries annually, the recent and historical records of success are a great source of ideas to learn from and to enhance the rate of discovery.

Over the last two decades, important gold discoveries have been made in well-established gold provinces such as Australia, Canada and USA, regions with a long history of production like Ghana, and some further countries such as China, Mali, Tanzania and Peru that received lesser attention during the twentieth century. In contrast to the dominance of gold-only deposits throughout the last millennium of gold production, a significant proportion of recent discoveries are gold-plus, especially Cu–Au.

There have been some golden periods of exploration success in various parts of the world and as well as providing inspiration for exploration, they are sources of learning. Examples include the discoveries in Victoria (1850s), in the Witwatersrand (1886) including Carletonville (1930s) and Welkom (1940s), in the Carlin gold province of Nevada (1961 and 1980s), in the Yilgarn Craton (1980–1990s), and SW Pacific (1980s). Any area that is the focus of one of these golden periods attracts increased exploration activity and funding at the expense of less productive areas.

There is additional knowledge to glean from non-success. Despite being the world's major source of gold for the twentieth century, South Africa stands out for its lack of recent exploration success with no new goldfields discovered since Evander in 1951. This lack of exploration success has led to an 80% fall in gold production since the 1970 peak, and one significant consequence is a major decrease in revenue, and hence employment, in that industry.

Important ingredients in exploration success are area selection, appropriate exploration technologies and models, and skilled and motivated people. Some commentators have added luck to this list though this may be mis-guided. Instead, the thesis presented here is that doing exploration is like doing science; mineral discovery – like scientific breakthrough – is a rare event, and the way teams think and interact is a very important determinant of success in both mineral exploration and in science. If this thesis is valid, then teaching explorers to think and creating environments in which they can do so should favour discovery. It cannot be taken for granted that systematic thinking processes will be either taught or learned at all institutions, but rather there are places and people who enhance the development of thinking skills.

Exploration teams need to safe-guard against groupthink by the involvement of self- and external critical evaluation. Unorthodoxy will always have an important place in exploration while discovery remains a rare event well-removed from the norm; this is parallel to scientific revolutions which often owe their origin to unorthodox thinking and attention to minor anomalies. Introducing simple practices such as a fostering of a single-minded focus on discovery, maintaining a line-of sight from activities back to one's aims, encouraging unorthodoxy and avoiding the pernicious mentality of groupthink can be adopted at little cost.