About 30% of the world’s nickel (Ni) comes from magmatic deposits. Despite accounting for a minority of Ni production, magmatic deposits are highly sought-after due to their large tonnage, high grades, and ease of processing relative to Ni laterite deposits. In fact, the world’s most valuable ore body is a magmatic nickel deposit. Magmatic Nickel…

Deposit models are the cornerstone of economic geology. They help us classify, understand, and find mineral deposits. Some deposits, however, have remained hard to classify, let alone understand or predict. Efforts to explain these unusual deposits have led to calls to define a whole new type of mineral deposit: Metasomatic Iron Alkali Calcic (MIAC). If…

By now, you’ve probably heard of China’s dominance in the production of strategically important rare earth elements (REEs). Recently Australia has emerged as the world’s fourth largest producer or REEs, and, with a slew of new REE projects and discoveries, it may be poised to challenge China’s status as the world’s undisputed REE heavyweight. Rare…

Geology can be hard to predict on the local scale (there’d be a lot fewer jobs for geologists otherwise) but on larger scales there is an order to how and when mountains, mineral deposits, and more occur. The theory of plate tectonics explains most geologic features, but even tectonics have changed throughout geologic time, with…

We usually think of rocks as being unchanging, but sooner or later the heat and pressure of tectonic forces, volcanic activity, or just steady burial by more and more rocks forces metamorphoses them into something else. Ore deposits are no exception and understanding how metamorphism has affected deposits in ways positive, negative, or just plain…

Introduction South Africa is famous for gold, with paleoplacer deposits of the Witwatersrand Basin having produced a large fraction of the world’s gold. The country’s first gold mines, however, were established 130 years ago in the Sabie-Pilgrims Rest Goldfield and produced gold from an entirely different type of deposit. Now an Australian company, Theta Gold…

Industrial mining is the foundation of modern society, everything that isn’t grown as a crop is ultimately derived from minerals or petroleum extracted from the Earth. Mining is also expensive and known to cause many environmental issues related mainly to toxic mine wastes and habitat destruction. In-situ leaching (ISL) methods, however, are increasingly allowing certain…

The potential of a property can be a hard thing to access during the early stages of exploration. Working in under-explored areas offers the promise of making a major discovery, at the cost of high degrees of uncertainty, and, more often than not, a long, winding road to success. Delta Resources is experiencing this firsthand…