Abstract

APPLIED EARTH SCIENCE (TRANS. INST. MIN. METALL. B), 2018 VOL. 127, NO. 1, 1 https://doi.org/10.1080/03717453.2018.1435035 It is often said that the next big discovery has already been concept rarely tried before and certainly not in this made – just that we have not realised or recognised it yet. area. Early soil geochemistry results come back, and the The context here is a mineral exploration programme that numbers are much lower than the company leaders might have sampled, intersected or identified the discov- have been used to seeing around their existing gold depos- ery but for some reason it has not been followed up. The its that are a thousand kilometre away in a different ter- chances are that details of this yet-to-be-made discovery rain. The company is generally short of cash to fund are already in company files and even government any programmes, and for our example project, the gain- records. ing of land access and permissions to drill have proved So why would an exploration team not recognise a dis- costly in time and money. With corporate survival fore- covery and follow it up when that is their whole raison most, the leadership has little interest in the