Andrew Watson reports that this is the first article which will look at some of the great mineral deposits of the world. These are the mega-deposits that keep hopeful young junior geologists up at night dreaming of drill cores, the kind that are the subject of a million conference papers and make or break legendary figures. Watson writes about one of the biggest and baddest of them all- Olympic Dam in South Australia. It is unimaginably large and has a huge impact since it was discovered. It was the first active mine to crack 1 trillion dollars in metal resources, it caused huge political uproar and single handedly overturned the uranium mining ban in South Australia and if that was not enough it is the type deposit for a previously undescribed style of mineralization.Owned and operated by BHP Billiton, it is the definition of a Tier 1 asset clocking in at 1.408 billion tons at 1.08 per cent copper, 0.32 kilograms per ton of U3O8 - uranium oxide, 0.34g per t gold and 2.07g per t silver. The total resource including indicated and inferred works out to 172.8 billion pounds of copper, 95 million ounces of gold, 429 million ounces of silver and 5.5 billion pounds of uranium. In addition to these metals, there are substantial quantities of Rare Earths at Olympic Dam. Keep in mind that the ore zones are relative to the background mineralization which is unimaginably massive as the entire mineralized area has a background value of 0.5 per cent Copper, 0.2 kg Uranium 0.5 g per t gold and 1 g per t silver over a 50 km2 area.
Since its discovery and description in the 1970s, other deposits have been either re-interpreted as the model or new discoveries have been made using exploration techniques developed at Olympic Dam, however, none has even come close to matching the original.
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