Geophysicial Prospecting

		Quote:			Posted by chase3285
	I been prospecting for high grade gold veins in NE Oregon that are capped over and difficult to find. Can you use electromagnetic geophysicial equipment like a Beep Mat or the like to pick up on decimated gold particals in quartz? Have a small core drill, trying to pick out anomalys to cut down on the expence of core drilling blind..... Any Ideas will help. Thinking about renting electromagnetic Beep Map this spring, has anybody used this equipment before?

Have a look at this:

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The concept is intriguing and fairly simple to test.

Then look at this:

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That one is even more exciting to think about.

The beep mat looks interesting but looks to me like you must already have a general idea of what you are looking for before you use it. I wouldn't want to wander around looking for gold ore. A large nugget, perhaps, but gold in ore is not as easy to find.

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		Quote:			Posted by getusome
	that second article is actually kind of scary. who's to stop them from developing the techniques to intentionally produce gold using the bacteria rather that just simply noting it and allowing it to continue naturally? spells out economic disaster.

What's the difference between crushing ore and extracting it or using bacteria to gather it? The gold isn't being created in either case. It's being collected and put into ingots. The bacterial method seems far more economical.

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They have been using bacteria for years on heap leachs and leach tanks to liberate the gold from the sulfide ore making it susceptible to cyanide leach for years.
They even use bacteria in oil and fuel spills. They use bacteria in abandoned oil wells or low producing wells.  Freeing up the thick oil and thin it down enough to pump. Greatly extending the life of our oil wells
This gold loving bacteria is just one more tool in the miners tool chest. They even now think that the gold secreting bacteria were in the hot hydrothermal solutions that came up thru the cracks and channels from the cooling magma and played a important part in depositing gold and other minerals. Converting gold in ion state into nano specs of gold. And just when we thought we knew everything.........

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There is a diminishing point of return. The ore still has to be mined, crushed, milled, handled, and stripped of it's precious metals. Whether you use bacteria, and cyanide or what ever, it costs so many bucks per ton. There is a point that it wont be cost effective until the price of gold gets high enough to make it lucrative to mine. They mine gold so low grade and so fine you can't see it with the naked eye. Yet they make money and that is without bacteria........

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Not likely that they will go overboard.....Copper prices tend to be more volatile than do gold prices which is why copper mines keep shutting down and then re-opening.   When it costs more to recover the metal than you make from selling it, it simply doesn't pay to operate the mine no matter what metal you are mining or what method you are using. 

But let the price of the metal go back up, and then you'll see lower grade deposits being worked using  more economical/efficient methods than were employed before.   There can be a fortune in older tailings if the right recovery methods are used, BUT there has to be enough metal content to justify the recovery and (the big kicker in our day and age) the total costs incurred including environmental impact costs/ounce has to be significantly lower than the price you can get at time of sale.      Flood the market and demand (even for gold) goes down which in turns puts a lot of the facilities that specialize in the high tech recover of metal from low grade sources out of  business.

BA

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