Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Gold in The Outback, Stories with Professor Steve Mattox (GeoShort)

Transcript

Gold in The Outback, Stories with Professor Steve Mattox (GeoShort) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, how are you doing today?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing great.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing, Jesse?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I'm doing really well.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm excited for today's episode, to be honest with you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get to that, let's do some brief introductions.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: You are Chris Bullheis, a nationally recognized Earth Science teacher from the great state of Michigan.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you are Jesse Ramink, one of my former students, now a professor of geoscience at Penn State.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is Planet Geo, a podcast where we talk about amazing aspects of our planet and why it matters to our everyday lives.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Today we get to talk to Dr.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Steve Maddox, a professor at Grand Valley State University.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: And Steve has had a very diverse career path.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: And today he talks about a couple of his mining experiences back in the good old days.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Tune in next week for the full interview with Dr.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Maddox.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious about your work in, well, in the geosciences, we call it the exploration industry, which is kind of an unclear term.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain what the exploration industry is?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like what happens in that field?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was really fortunate.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um my wife is a geologist.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: She was offered a job in West Australia.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I arrived there with a work visa.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I could go to work.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I applied to dozens of jobs.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the first job, essentially, they said, Oh, I see you've made geologic maps.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, sounds like you could do things in the field.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Would you go to the far north in West Australia?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I worked a three and one.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I worked three weeks in the field, continuous days, and then I got a week off.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately that evolved to four weeks in the field, then nine days off.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we didn't have kids.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: My wife's a geologist, so she has to go out in the field too.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we just kind of set up our schedules.
• 1:54
  unknown: Okay.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we looked for gold in West Australia.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I had a fieldie.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: They were always uh exciting people.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's a what's a fieldie?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: A fieldie is a field assistant who's been trained at a technical school to drive a four-wheel drive in incredible situations and collect geologic samples.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so my job is to navigate us to the spot where I think we could collect uh gold.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so we would essentially uh leave early and do 12-hour days and go to remote areas and collect gravels.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: We took the gravel back to a chemist.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So she was spending her 28 days in a little trailer doing chemistry.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we all got paid well for our work, but it was fantastic to be in the outback.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, we found soils at 28 parts per million gold, which is economic concentration.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that there's enough gold in the ground.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: So economic concentration means it's it's economically viable to be mined at the price of gold at that time.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't know the size of the deposit.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so we located that, and that was interesting, but at the same time, the price of gold went down to well, it went below$200 an ounce, so it was no longer economical.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's so cheap compared to gold today, right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, gold's what$1,900 an ounce or something?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: All right, and then the other thing along with that is did anything really interesting happen?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Every day was really interesting.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Aborigines uh out hunting kangaroos.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so that was interesting to see.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Realize I also had an exploration job in Indonesia and we mapped base metals.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mapped base metals deposit in Indonesia.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so seeing uh rural Indonesia was uh a really incredible experience and the geology.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So to do geology where you were in a tropical rainforest and no one else spoke English, and I had seven seven field assistants there uh was an incredible experience.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it goes back to you realize that geology majors will do field camp and learn about field mapping, and then I developed that for my master's thesis.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Those skills are very transferable to a lot of different occupations and other kinds of investigations.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So people would look at my resume and say, Oh, I don't want you for the job that you applied for, but would you go to Indonesia and make a map for me?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And be like, Yeah, sure, I can do that.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that's interesting.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really cool.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I so you mentioned base metals in Indonesia.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Base metals, can you just briefly explain what base metals are in our terminology here?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, lead, copper, and zinc minerals.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've done the gold exploration.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of rocks were you looking at in in Western Australia?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I know there's a lot of Archean, you know, ancient rock uh complexes there.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what are you looking at?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain the day-to-day here?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I when I was first exposed to the exploration industry when I went to grad school in Canada, I mean, I thought it was just the most amazing industry.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: I still don't quite understand how it works, the economics of the whole industry.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, were you working for one of these junior, like small company exploration companies, or was this a big mining company?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: What was the site looking like?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, it was a smaller company that leased uh a huge number of, I don't know if it was acres or square kilometers.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we had some data provided from from the government, and there was critical thinking involved as far as where to go and collect.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: But we collected from a lot of drainages, turned the materials in, we'd get our data back and decide skip that drainage or go back to that drainage and keep moving up the watershed.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you're looking for placers, Steve?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're looking for something hosted in bedrock, but we're taking samples, yes, from sand and gravel.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is taking stream sediments and assuming that the the stuff in the stream is coming from upstream, and then you're kind of gradually working upstream trying to find the source there.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we found the hillside that was shedding gold into the stream system.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Did you really?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so what was the concentration there?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because you said you had 28 parts per million in the soil.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we we reached we'd get up to like 4,500 parts per million in our samples.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So pretty neat.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: But like my gold wedding band would be two tons of economic grade gold ore.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're wearing a wedding band, you're not really an environmentalist.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, I got I got mine tattooed on, Steve.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I want to get back to what the rocks are looking like.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm interested.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is this, you know, the a lot of the gold deposits on Earth are hosted in these 2.7 billion year old volcanic sequences?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Is this what you're looking at?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they were mafic.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna joke and say they were tortured.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they are mafic and they almost seem like they've been metamorphosed and and deformed twice.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they've been through a lot.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, interesting.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the gold, uh, this is sort of really ancient gold hosted in these deposits, or it's younger fluid derived gold.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think it's older.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Steve, what is the best thing or most interesting thing that you discovered during those years?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was fantastic to be out there.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: I have no desire to go four-wheel driving because we've done it to the extreme.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic animals, mostly large reptiles, not poisonous snakes, but large lizards in the outside.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Steve, you're not describing any of the rocks here.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on with this geology thing?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: The best things are four-wheeling in animals.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean and and using, you know, your skills to go find the deposit.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the other was it was interesting in Indonesia because they had a large amount of geophysical data, but they had no idea what the geology was.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And to realize that the base metal deposit is at the contact of the unconformity with the limestone above it, you know, it was kind of pretty straightforward geology and chemistry, but they were clueless about why it was there until they just sent a geologist to make sense of it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the skill set that I had developed that I could deploy wherever, wherever someone would send me was was, I appreciated that.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's really interesting, Steve.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I've always been totally fascinated by the economic and in industrial side of the geosciences.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really interesting to hear your stories there.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, we're going to wrap up this geo short and stay tuned for our full interview next week with Dr.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Steve Maddox, where we're going to get into some additional aspects of the economic side of geoscience and also some educational aspects of the geosciences and kind of how we can do better for communicating the importance of geoscience to our everyday lives.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.