As time goes on, it has become more and more difficult to find new areas to mine for gold. Since most of the geologically obvious ore deposits have already been found, prospecting at the industrial scale is more time-intensive and costly than ever. Mining companies are not just looking for gold – they’re looking for new ways to find gold. Fortunately, geology consultants from Nevada Exploration Inc. (NGE) may have a solution.
Gold can be easy to detect in areas where the bedrock is exposed or covered by only a shallow layer of overburden (i.e. sand, gravel, dirt, etc.). When the bedrock is concealed beneath a deep layer of overburden, it makes it much more challenging to find specific ore deposits, like gold. Imagine you’re at Chuck E. Cheese’s and someone throws your car keys into the ball pit while you aren’t looking. If the ball pit is shallow or empty, you can recover the keys with minimal effort. But if you’re waist-deep in plastic balls, you could spend hours digging around without ever being sure if your keys are nearby or in a different area of the pit.
Rather than aimlessly searching yourself, it’d be more effective if you had scouts that could move through the balls and tell you whether or not they passed by your keys. In geology, this scouting role is filled by groundwater – and NGE claims to have figured out how to reveal where it’s been and what it’s seen. Learn more in our next blog post!
