Have technology, will prospect.

• Author: Pratt, Fred
• Position: Geophysical prospecting - Alaska Miners Association: Annual Convention & Trade Fair

High-tech mining tools are uncovering new mother lodes for today's miners.

The prospector of the 1990s has a shiny spot worn on the seat of his pants before he puts the first mile on his boots.

Modern technology available in Alaska today promises a long winter of work before the summer field season at a mine site. Using simulations created from satellite data, a prospector can "fly" a computer over any terrain around the state. Aided by inexpensive maps and satellite photos, he can view hundreds of square miles of land photographed by the latest airborne geophysics. Other computer programs can model underground ore deposits, design mines and tackle complex environmental questions.

All this technology requires is that the miner be as deft at a computer keyboard as he is with a gold pan or rock hammer. But with these new technologies, the miner can go farther than he ever did with a gold pan and hammer; these days, he can target his time outdoors to new sites he may have once overlooked.

GEOPHYSICS FROM THE AIR

The biggest, cheapest and most publicly available high-technology mining asset is the state of Alaska's new airborne geophysical survey program. Inaugurated last year, it produced maps of the Nome and Circle areas that were unveiled at a mining conference held in Fairbanks last spring. With work only beginning, there are already 27 state reports covering four areas, available in everything from $3 maps to $150 CD ROM archives.

Alaska is a late-comer in making such data available to the public, explains Dick Swainbank, the state's mining development advocate with the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development. Where such surveys have long been done by private companies that kept the data closely guarded, Canada, Australia and Lower 48 states have found that surveying their own lands and making the data public at nominal costs attracts both large companies and small prospectors to make new discoveries.

Traditional prospecting is limited to sampling bedrock outcrops where they poke through the soil, or tracing them through stream-water samples, sediment samples and placer deposits. A mineral deposit has to be near the surface to be detected, and it has to show enough assets that a prospector feels it's worth the cost of sampling to drill or trench the site.

Geophysics allows prospectors to look hundreds of feet into the earth where there might not be outcroppings. There's nothing new about airborne geophysics, but modern...