Exploring For Red Blobs

One key lesson that my glittering multi-decade career at the cutting edge of mineral exploration has taught me – which I touched on in an earlier post– is that much of your university ejumakashun in geology is a total waste of time. Mohr’s circle? Shite. Ternary phase diagrams? Unnecessary torture. Graptolite evolution? The biggest waste of intellectual effort since David Icke went nuts (look him up…)

But urbancrows is here to help with a shiny pearl of geo-wisdom. Undergraduate geologists who feel compelled to self-flagellate by joining the exploration business (foolhardy souls…) can safely cut out most of their studies and still guarantee themselves a successful career by focusing on one thing and one thing only. Red blobs. Learn how to spot, interpret and explore red blobs and you’ll be set for life with a management position just around your 20-something corner.

For example, igneous rocks -as any fool knows- form by the solidification of magma or lava. By a happy coincidence, many types of metallic mineral deposits form as a consequence of the huge amounts of heat and mineral-rich steam that cooling igneous rocks give off: some of the richest sources of economic metals are granites and related rocks.

Luckily for exploration geologists, these rocks are always shown on geological maps as red blobs, a fact that geologists keep to themselves. It’s one of our little secrets – a trick of the trade that allows us to convince investors, friends, and gullible children that we use bleeding-edge science to guide our exploration programs. 

In fact, anyone could go on line and buy the same geological maps that we use. Then, pack up the egg salad sandwiches and a nice artisan craft bottled ale and head to where the red blobs are. Guaranteed, you’ll make massive world class mineral discoveries the same day and still be home in time for tea and crumpets with mum. Try it.

In the world of exploration and mining, red blobs are everywhere. Assay results, soil surveys, geophysics, igneous geology, stream geochemistry – the list is endless. And all of those blobs mean the same thing: whatever it is you’re looking for it’s here! And to help you along, we’ve coloured it a handy shade of red. Brilliant.

Consider the UK. Not that big, but hugely diverse geology for a small island. It hosts a decent textbook selection of the metallic mineral deposits types that economic geologists explore for, and a whole host of non-metallic types, from kaolinite, to coal, to potash.

Without this well stocked larder of usable commodities, the industrial revolution would have taken substantially longer to get going and we may never have built such a rapacious empire. (I should give a mention in dispatches to trees as well. We – the English- needed wood. A lot of it. Which we once had but subsequently burned it, hacked it, sliced it and charcoaled most of it to smelt steel and build our cargo and military ships.)

But I digress. Most of the metallic systems in the UK, with the exception, perhaps, of carbonate-hosted lead-zinc, are associated with felsic intrusive igneous rocks. For example, the Parys Mountain VMS copper deposit in North Wales, the 20th century gold discoveries in Scotland, or the Cornish tin-tungsten deposits. And felsic intrusives are usually depicted on geological maps as pink or red blobs. Easy, right?

If we look at a selectively edited map of the UK -ok, only Cornwall if you must know- the correlation between the tin-tungsten-copper ore veins and red blobs is obvious. The old timers could’ve saved themselves an awful lot of grubbing around in dead adits by simply paying attention to blob distribution, if they’d had maps that is. Which they didn’t.

Those clever software engineers recognised decades ago our propensity to gravitate toward red blobs. So most geo-programs now give you the choice of highlighting stuff like gravity anomalies, zinc enrichment in soils, magnetic highs..anything really.. in red. The precise shade of red they use is a trade secret. But it’s powerfully addictive and zooms in directly to upper management’s nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure centre, causing them to quickly approve any work programs or software purchases that might lead to more red blobs.

So, there you have it. Focus on the red blobs and fast forward your career. You can thank me later.

Don’t Forget

If you have your own red blob story, urbancrows would love to hear it via the scarlet-tinged comments section below. You can also subscribe to urbancrows.com via the blood-red subscription box at the top of the home page. I’ll be sure to mail you more dullness from time to time.