Odds ‘n’ Sods: Surviving Soviet-style exploration

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 under the banner of its subsidiary, Minorco. Anglo essentially gave us carte blanche and a decent budget to conduct reconnaissance exploration along the Tethyan belt from Hungary through to Pakistan, with the odd ad hoc side trip to visit other regions of interest. The Soviet-style exploration carried out under communism was pretty bloody awful. The metallogenic theories applied were, to say the least, iffy, and pretty much all exploration results were regarded as state secrets. From our conversations with the geologists we hired, both young and old, 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 according to the prevailing political dogma, 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 to be able to confidently assess the full data sets. Continue reading at The Northern Miner.