by Steve Beresford, Co-Founder of Altai Resources
Declining discovery rates
Every second article on exploration seems to discuss declining discovery rates. This is a very complex subject that has proven hard to fix, either inside a single company or across the industry as a whole. Not every major or junior company is trying to discover new mines, so the first step is that mean discovery rates mean very little on a personal or company level. If you follow others then you are also trying to be average, you are regressing to the mean of the industry. Often our employment and livelihoods depend on following others and this is the trap that leads to negative error cultures and decision paralysis, or phrased more abruptly—a lack of courage.
We spend money on building cultures and designing strategies that are more measurable. This approach will only become more common in the future digitalizing world of modern exploration. A quick review of the interviews and articles in this magazine will lead you to a plethora of improvements in designing project portfolios and ensuring better targeting.
Intrinsic motivation
My simple premise is that not all changes in the transition to a modern workforce have been positive. A relic of the past was recruiting and inspiring geologists who want the thrill of the chase, who see the romance in being the first to see core coming off the rig, in standing on mountain tops where no one has been before, or describing a rock for the first time. There are many pejorative terms for exploration geologists, some in jest, but, in essence, all of these terms boil down to: we embrace uncertainty and solve for it. This career path is not for all geologists, some will never be comfortable with the uncertainty. There is no negative connotation in that comment, only honesty. There are geologists and geologists; there is room for all types. In fact, the majority of geologists will not be suitable for it and as an industry, we would not want this behavior across the whole value chain.
The technical opposite of exploration is anxiety. Exploration is a universal biological process to solve uncertainty. Your glial cells clean around your neurons at night, an animal forages for food, and an airport scanner searches for objects that could be illegal in your baggage. Opportunity only exists because we don’t know beforehand. If we already knew the answer, there would be no opportunity. Those who wait, die. This is why a large proportion of science is also discovery-driven. We discover and then science adapts to this discovery. So why do we default to certainty? Anxiety is the response to not solving uncertainty. Its easiest solution is avoidance.
A modern company often recruits as if all geologists are the same, as if there is no such thing as a 1000x geologist, i.e. a geologist who can perform at the level of a thousand times above another. We know the latter is true, we have many examples throughout history, but acknowledging it leads to accusations of elitism. This viewpoint also does not disprove the axiom that teams are required to discover ore deposits. Both are demonstrably true, regardless of your own beliefs. How do we reconcile both true statements?
Recruiting for and inspiring the thrill of the chase is our secret sauce because other extrinsic drivers and culture can be easily solved by two of the so-called big five personality traits: openness and curiosity.
Intrinsic motivation remains the biggest lever, larger than budget, IQ, technology, access, or red tape. This does not deny that budgets or these other path constraints are a limiting factor, just that they are downstream of larger, more fundamental and higher-level drivers. These are drivers that experienced discoverers would agree with, but which are lost in the tracking of easier-to-measure criteria. How do you measure intrinsic motivation? I can hear someone say, ‘but if you don’t have funds, you can’t chase the targets you need to’. This is correct, but finance is often a blunt tool used to solve poor exploration. The counter view that budget isn’t enough is therefore also demonstrably true. Why are we overfunding some, and underfunding others?
Exploration as a universal process
Exploration is a universal biological process, and mineral exploration is just the applied use of multi-disciplinary techniques to discover economic quantity of metals. We know much about the science of exploration that we can lend to the field of mineral exploration. Mineral exploration itself evolved from prospecting, a still relevant form of discovery in remote surficial terrains. As the world’s surface-based expressions of deposits have matured, exploration has morphed into a more multi-disciplinary science.
I work on one deposit style these days, so I can more easily avoid distraction (another serious psychological issue in a world of large volumes of recycled data). We live in distracted times. Most jobs are dominated by unnecessary and unplanned work. This is proving very hard to fix because it is measured as work, when it is in fact distraction. We measure the speed of the hamster wheel.
This focus might seem narrow but in fact, I use a huge swath of disciplines and work on projects in many countries (a necessity in avoiding overly constrained and weak strategies). One of those disciplines is archaeometallurgy. This is the science that studies metals from ancient artifacts and coins. One primary aim of this work is to ascertain the provenance of metals and track the movement of people, and the development of innovations, especially when primary written sources are limited or absent.
For example, Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire and subsequent death in Babylon set in motion the Hellenistic Age, a huge expanse of Greek influence around the Mediterranean and Near East, extending all the way to Bactria.
The written accounts of this period are all secondary, and amount to a few pages at maximum. Most of what we know about this period comes from coins and their study, the science of numismatics. The chemistry of these coins marks a technosignature, i.e. a footprint of the mine manifests in a form of technology, coins usage for example. This technosignature is common to many deposits discovered in the Classical world. Sometimes these mines are known, sometimes they are yet to be rediscovered.
Micro XRF analysis (Tornado) of Ni content (left) and Cu content (right).
I look for deposits worth billions to trillions of dollars, literally in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the technosignatures generated in his wake, across Central Asia. You cannot aim higher than that. I think this is easier than exploring smaller deposits, i.e. it is easier to look for a rarer, more salient signature. Does anyone want to join me?
This is of course a trick question, but it does sort every geologist into two piles—those that want to take on this challenge, and those that do not. When I first became a Chief Geologist of a major company and took on the responsibility of inspiring large teams, I used to circulate a library of great discoveries and discoverers. Loaded into this lending was the statement: if these books do not inspire you, this is not a career path for you. Chuck Fipke and the discovery of Ekati was one such book. If you cannot imagine yourself in Chuck’s position, then it’s either an aspirational development goal or a conclusion. This will seem harsh. Some will say that surely everyone deserves a chance. Most of you do not know me, if you did, you would know I strongly believe that everyone can be inspired to explore. I see this as the answer to that poor teacher you had at high school and why you aren’t a mathematician or a structural geologist. I am talking to you, Dr Campbell!
You aren’t born with intrinsic motivation, it emerges from your dealings with the world, and with others. I run a lot of workshops on building exploration teams, and I would say this last point is very controversial. I have been yelled at for this opinion. I would also say I’m not sure I’m right, I just choose to lean towards teaching and mentoring others.
Building exploration teams throughout history
We have been learning how to build exploration teams since the Egyptians in the Fourth Dynasty created the ‘sementiu’, an elite team of geology prospectors sent off across the Red Sea or the Gulf of Suez in search of copper.
Copper was crucial to the sophisticated canal-harbor network and tools involved in the building of the Great Pyramids (you might be surprised to find it wasn’t aliens!).
The advantage of the innovation of hieroglyphs and use of native papyri means we know more about Egypt (and continue to learn) than comparable empires. One of the first learnings from the first largescale exploration team was the concept of searching in the ‘otherness’ of the lands beyond the known. The ancient Greeks had their own term—‘oikumene’. Of course, these are the modern exploration concept of ‘search space’, which has been behind exploration philosophy for thousands of years.
One of my favorite recorded names of a geologist is ‘The repeller of scorpions’. I immediately thought this was Kris Butera at Plutonic Ltd. These teams ventured beyond the Nile Valley, beyond the Eastern Desert, into the ‘otherness’.
The PPE the teams were given was sandals and myrrh. They moved through the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea, then crossed to the Sinai. This is the discovery of one of the world’s first Tier One mines. The copper was then shipped back to the enormous building complexes and ports at Giza and recorded in papyri and inscriptions on either side of the Gulf of Suez/Red Sea. The discovery of these papyri by Pierre Tallet and his team is one of the great discoveries of the 21st century.
Copper became harder to find as the Early and Middle Kingdoms progressed. The decline in copper discovery was described by the vizier Ptahhotep with the expression ‘perfect speech is more hidden than malachite’. Discoveries were scarce, the easily reachable deposits had been depleted. This maturation of the search space was 5000 years ago!
Some of the sementiu preferred to be based at the various temples and transfer stations like Tell Edfu, from where we can now track the steps and path of copper from mine to pyramid.
The reward was the discovery of ‘ḫtjw mfk3t’, the Terraces of Turquoise, and a bigger source of ‘Bja’ to make Hsmn or arsenical copper. Hsmn was a key metallurgical innovation with bronze-like hardness needed to make the tools to help cut limestone. The Goddess of Mining, Hathor, must have been stoked.
Building discovery cultures and teams is not easy, but I do know that the majority of exploration geologists agree with me on needing a return to the romance of exploration. Exploration geologists are screaming for proper exploration jobs, i.e. one that is truly exploring to find mines, not trying to avoid discovery. We are boring the current generation of geologists. This isn’t just a grey hair looking through rose-colored glasses (although I have grey hair and the world does seem pink somehow!), it’s a call to action to re-engage with some of the essential elements we let go in our evolution to modern digitalized science. These two philosophies were never mutually exclusive.
Real mineral exploration is rarer than it should be.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Martin Odler and Pierre Tallet for the Egypt translations, and the work of many archaeologists especially over the last decade in Egypt and Central Asia. I remain an amateur in the footsteps of explorers searching for the prize.
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