Last week, a regular Urbancrows reader emailed me to suggest I write about what minerals geologists actually do. Not a bad idea thinks I, from up high on my perch in the Urbancrows e-rookery. So I’ve decided to take him up on the idea with an informal series of blog posts, starting soon, loosely themed “The Things Geologists Do”. It’ll be based largely on my own experiences since I graduated in 1984, but I’d welcome suggestions or questions from non-geologists who might find themselves puzzled by the activities of their rock-hound cousins.
The more astute readers may have already guessed that I work in the mining and exploration business. I trained as a geologist, formalising via my university education the passion for rocks that I developed as a skinny kid, grubbing for fossils in the white chalk cliffs of Kent in southeast England. My bedroom was full of match boxes containing fossil bivalves, sea urchins, crinoids and whatever else I could find and clean up with my well-worn toothbrush.
It’s hard to think of a more benign introduction to earth science, so when I got to University I still had no clue what an actual professional geologist did for a living. With the internet 20 years away, and a limited local library, the only geologists I saw at home were tweedy university-types in TV documentaries (invariably narrated by David Attenborough) staring at orange rivers of lava in Hawaii, or arm waving about the theory of continental drift. That all changed for me in the Fall of 1984 when I landed my first job as a mine geologist in the deep level gold mines in the great Witwatersrand gold province of South Africa.
Singlehandedly responsible for my career as a geologist.
Since my African sojourn, I’ve experienced or worked in every stage of the extractive process from grassroots prospecting and exploration, through mine development, to open pit and underground production. So while I don’t claim to be a gold-standard authority on any of the technical /professional correctness of the activities I’m going to write about, they will be based on first-hand experience, so that’s something.