GEOSCIENCE HISTORY California wildfires, continued from p.47


as well as the health and safety of the community and those directly involved with the debris removal operations. On a personal note, I arrived on a site that required additional work and found nesting birds within the work zone. I notified project managers and a project biologist mobilized to the site to evaluate the situation. Work for this site has been delayed until the nesting birds leave.


The widespread drought that has affected California over the last couple decades has made the area more prone to


Geoscience History, continued


reading of classic papers. While I never took the course, I have enjoyed reading many of the classic papers over the years.


One of my favorite (historic) books is Agricola’s 1556 De Re Metallica2, which contains everything you needed to know about mining in 1556 and still full of useful information due in part to the extensive explanatory footnotes by Herbert Hoover. Four examples illustrate the point.


Now a miner, before he begins to mine the veins, must consider seven things, namely: - the situation, the conditions, the water, the roads, the climate, the right of ownership, and the neighbors. Modern mineral resource and reserve classification systems basically expand the details of this 7-item list.


Three excellent pieces of investment advice:


[Investors] should not buy only high-priced shares in those mines producing metals, nor should they buy too many in neighboring mines where metal has not yet been found, lest should fortune not respond, they may be exhausted by their losses and have nothing with which they may meet their expenses or buy other shares which may replace their losses. This calamity overtakes those who wish to grow suddenly rich from mines, and instead, they become very much poorer than before. So then in the buying of shares, as in other matters, there should be a certain limit of expenditure which miners should set themselves, lest blinded by the desire for excessive wealth, they throw all their money away.


Moreover, a prudent owner, before he buys shares, ought to go to the mine and carefully examine the nature of the vein, for it is very important that he should be on his guard lest fraudulent sellers of shares should deceive him.


Shafts and tunnels should not be reopened unless we are quite certain of the reasons why the miners have abandoned them, because we ought not to believe that our ancestors were so indolent and spiritless as to desert mines that could have been carried on with profit. Indeed, in our own days, not a few min- ers, persuaded by old women’s tales, have reopened deserted shafts and lost their time and trouble. (Ben F. Dickerson, III, who quoted this passage in his “Rock in the Box” column in Mining Engineering, February


2.


1984, p. 181, noted that “‘old women’ were undoubt- edly like those of today, i.e., little old males.”)


My other favorite (historic) book is H.E. McKinstry’s 1948 Mining Geology, Prentice Hall, that was written for the recent graduate hired to work at a mine and explaining how the job is practically done. William C, Peters’ Exploration and Mining Geology, 1978 & 2nd ed., 1987, John Wiley & Sons, is an update version of McKinstry but lacks McKinstry’s great writing style. For example, here is McKinstry’s definition of a prospect, “A prospect is a potential ore producer which is still in its early stages of development; not until there is enough ore to support a substantial output does the prospect achieve the dignified status of ‘mine,’ A prospect may be merely an untouched ledge of outcropping vein matter, or it may be a for- mer mine that has produced thousands of tons, reduced again to the status of prospect by the removal of all its developed ore. These and other types of prospect have in common the fact that the ore reserves consist chiefly of hopes.” McKinstry footnotes this definition with the note, “Again I am using ‘ore’ in the technical sense of the word. A body of metal-bearing material is not an ore reserve until someone proves that it can be treated at a profit.”


McKinstry also has this excellent advice to consider when examining an old prospect, “The very fact that a prospect is inactive is a sign that something is wrong with it.” Others have examined the prospect and abandoned it for various reasons although the most common, if least mentioned by promoters, is lack of ore (a restatement of the last of Agricola’s observa- tions quoted above). What observations can you make that changes the situation?


Geoscience is an historical science. We do not conduct experi- ments to learn what will happen. We look at an outcrop and work to decipher what did happen in its creation. This fact alone should encourage us to pay attention to the history of our science. As John McPhee observed in Basin and Range, “If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.” Consider for a moment why that is such a great summarizing sentence.


As Sorkhabi notes in the bibliography at the end of his article, there are a number of excellent books on the history of geology. I would add the following to Sorkhabi’s list:


The great Devonian controversy: the shaping of scientific knowl- edge among gentlemanly specialists, Martin S.J. Rudwick, 1985, University of Chicago Press, 463 p.


Agricola, Georgius, 1556, De Re Metallica trans. Hoover, H.H. & Hoover, L.H., 1912: Dover Publications, 1950; still in print in both paper and hardbound. 52 TPG • Jul.Aug.Sep 2021 www.aipg.org


devastating wildfires. In the few months since the project began, the landscape has changed from charred hillsides and blackened trees to green grasses and beautiful wildflowers. Although Northern California is currently cycling back to dry vegetation, bringing back the threat for intense wildfires, we continue our efforts to support the community and get those affected by the 2020 wildfires back on their feet.


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