Sampling Theory, Sampling Practices and Their Economic Impact

Poor sampling, compounded by poor laboratory subsampling, leads to questionable geostatistics, and generates severe conciliation problems between the geological model, the mine, and the plant estimates. These problems also affect the price of commodities and the validity of environmental assessments. The result is a huge money loss for the company involved, evolving later in likely litigation. It is of key importance for geologists, miners, metallurgists, chemists, and environmental specialists to extract maximum information from the available data, as large investments and crucial decisions depend on it. False evaluations lead to devastating scenarios such as:

Abandonment of viable properties,
Exploitation of unprofitable properties,
Mismanagement of viable properties, and
Incompetence in fraud detection.