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Hadrian’s Wall

A Walk Along The Edge Of The Roman Empire

Two thousand years before Donald Trump’s underfunded (and, as yet, fruitless) efforts at walling in the US, the Romans were busy building walls on the outlying borders of their vast empire. In Scotland, they built the Antonine wall in AD142. It was a 63km long earth bank cutting east to west across the country at its narrowest point. And in today’s modern Germany, you can still see remnants of the Limes Germanicus, a partly-fortified frontier that used a combination of natural obstacles and wooden palisade to guard the northern border of the Empire from the dastardly unconquered Germanic tribes.

But Hadrian’s wall in northern England is probably the best known. It stretches for over 70 miles across hill and valley from the east coast of England, at Wallsend in the outskirts of modern day Newcastle, to Bowness on Solway on the west coast. Bowness is an isolated but attractive little village that’s periodically cut off from the rest of the country by high tides on the Solway Firth.

*Hadrian’s Wall as it is today, Upper Denton nr. Carlisle.*

August Stock Picking Update

Greeting Stockpickers,

With summer slipping away and September upon us, it’s time for another look at how the world’s greatest mining stock picking club (Hys and Lows) is faring. The following is an edited version of my monthly note to the club members, members’ names redacted.

First, a quick reminder of how our exclusive and much-envied club works. It’s not a formal membership-fee type of club, just a casual once-a-year gathering of 25 or so mining people at a steak restaurant in downtown Vancouver. We meet in late January to contemplate the state of the industry, drink good red wine and pick stocks.

*3 out of 4 drunken barristers agree that Hys and Lows is awesome.*

Exploring Communism

The Tethyan Belt Is Calling

After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe was a rich hunting ground for mineral exploration companies. In the mid-1990s I was part of a small, enthusiastic team assembled by Anglo American PLC under the banner of its subsidiary, Minorco. Anglo essentially gave us carte blanche to conduct reconnaissance exploration along the Tethyan belt from Hungary through to Pakistan, with the odd side trip to visit other regions of interest.

*Iranian village kids, late 1990s, exploring their little part of the Tethyan belt.*

The Soviet-style exploration carried out under communism was pretty bloody awful. The metallogenic theories they applied were iffy to say the least, and all exploration results were regarded as state secrets. The geologists we hired told us that project information was rationed by the higher-ups, so the underlings never really got to see the whole picture – it was need-to-know stuff, and the juniors didn’t need to know. Any half-decent field geologist will tell you that you can’t explore blind with your hands tied. You have to know the target concept and the results to be able to confidently assess a project.

The Science of Sampling

& The Art Of Thinking On Your Feet

Eleven out of ten mining and exploration professionals, particularly geostatisticians, agree that the science of sampling is crucial to the discovery process. I’d suggest that everything we do as minerals’ industry geologists can be focused down into that single activity: sampling.

Every dollar we spend on logistics, geophysics, drilling, mapping and beer is spent to collect samples. It’s the ONLY way to check that there’s metal in the fascinating rocks you’ve described in your monthly reports. Geophysics won’t tell you, regardless of what those shifty geophysicists say. Satellites can’t tell you from 300km up, and mapping definitely won’t tell you.

*Me (in the orange), 1984, Brittany, about to take a sample.*

The Ghost Train

A Tale Of Equipment Lost

Production is everything in mining. Sorry, I meant to say that safe production is everything. You can’t make money from a big hole in the ground if nothing useful is coming out of it and people are getting hurt.

Anyone who’s worked down a pit will eventually feel the pressure from higher up the food chain to produce more of whatever it is you’re mining. Sometimes the pressure will come from the stroppy, loud-mouthed chief mining engineer shouting at everyone when the mine is below quota. Or perhaps the plant head-grade will be changed constantly, necessitating closer geological control; a panicked attempt to get more ounces through the plant. I’ve experienced both.

Yup. That’s me alright.

Trouble With Toilets

I spent last weekend lolling around in the sunshine at the Vancouver folk music festival, down at Vancouver’s dusty Jericho Beach Park. It’s a wonderfully scenic spot for a fun weekend of eclectic music, watched by an equally eclectic Pacific Northwest crowd. People who wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a tie-dye T-shirt dose themselves in patchouli oil and let their inner hippies out of the artisan-crafted, organic bamboo box for a couple of days. Unfortunately, on hot weekends there’s nowhere in the festival grounds to hide from the blazing sun, so most sane people eventually gravitate to the beer garden for a cold brew and the safety of the sun umbrellas.

The north side of the beer garden is the business end, lined with grey and blue plastic jiffy johns; on warm days, they turn into scorching hot chemical-scented saunas. God help anyone who’s unfortunate enough to get stuck in one.

*Not my finest sartorial moment but at least I had cider.*

The Deep-Level Mine Geologist

Things Geologists Do. Part 2.

Earth scientists are a well-educated bunch, although we don’t always come across as clever when we’re 5 beers in to our cups. Most geologists –other than self-taught prospectors- have some form of university degree. Many of my colleagues were so enamored with the University study-drink-drink-more-study-repeat routine that they did what I did, and went back to university to earn a master’s degrees or doctorate on top of their undergrad’ degrees. Clever bunch, geologists. But eventually, assuming you have no wish to be an academic geologist or a waiter, reality bites and some sort of salaried earth science career is needed to fund the pub breaks.

A pint of beer. — *I hate work but I have to fund this somehow.*

In June 1984, much to my surprise, I graduated with a decent degree. A few months later I was poking forlornly around the City of London, knocking on doors and handing out a naively-bad resume to any mining company that would take it. I got my break when Anglo American interviewed me minutes after I walked into their head office looking for anyone from HR to talk to. A month later I was on a plane to Jo’burg to start a 3-year contract as a mine geologist in the deep-level gold mines in what was then the Western Transvaal (now Gauteng Province). After 2 days in the city signing paperwork, I was shipped off to the small mining town of Orkney, where I was billeted in the single mineworkers hostel and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end as a shaft geologist on Vaal Reefs 5 Shaft.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed

at the end of Hadrian’s Wall

For the next week, give or take a day, my wife and I will be hobbling along the full 135km length of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, pork pie in one hand and well-thumbed Ordnance Survey route map in the other.

*Anybody seen a wall? I’ve lost my map.*

As I’m sure you’ve already spotted, this raises 3 questions. Who was Hadrian? Why did he have a wall? Where is the wall? And why would I want to hike it? OK, that’s 4 questions.

A Guide to Common Ore Minerals

Geology students are trained to identify the commonest rock- and ore-forming minerals. It’s a vital skill for professional geologist. Sulphides, silicates, oxides, phosphates; we slog through dozens of them in our petrology labs, learning to identify the important ones using properties like colour, hardness, lustre (the way it shines or doesn’t), cleavage (how they split), density and such. As a kid, I loved this aspect of geology and by my early teens I could already identify the most common economic minerals such as galena (lead), sphalerite (zinc), chalcopyrite (copper), hematite (iron) and the flashier oxides and carbonates like malachite, rhodocrosite and azurite.

I Was Conned

But lately I’ve had this nagging feeling that I was conned at University in my undergraduate days. I missed out on an entire earth-science discipline, and I’m still stewing over it. I touched on this feeling of disquiet in an earlier post (Crystal Power).

In a futile attempt to scratch the itch, I decided to take a deeper look at the mineral properties we should’ve been learning about; the ones that haven’t made the mainstream textbooks yet. More’s the pity because I think these could be far more diagnostic and helpful to field geologists, particularly geologists with inter-dimensional Kundalini issues or Chakratic aura problems.

A Handel on Something Baroque

A Musical Interlude

If you asked me to list my Top 10 “go to” classical music pieces, I’d start by opening up iTunes and taking a gander at what I’ve listened to the most. High up the list you’ll see Bach (Chaconne), Tallis (anything), Pärt (Magnificat), the incredibly romantic middle movement from Chopin’s piano concerto #1, and Beethoven’s violin concerto –in short, a real mix from across the centuries and all stuff that I go back to time and time again.

One genre that’s under-represented is Baroque, a style probably most closely associated with German (Bach) and Italian (Vivaldi) composers. Bach’s the best known and the most accomplished composer of the Baroque era, rightfully revered as an astonishing musical innovator. Whilst I love much of his music, particularly the solo violin and cello works, I couldn’t listen to the entirety of the Goldberg piano variations in one sitting; there’s a bit too much mathematical twiddling around for me to maintain focus for more than 20 or so minutes.

Category: Me

Hadrian’s Wall

A Walk Along The Edge Of The Roman Empire

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August Stock Picking Update

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