Make Old Reports Again But Gooderer

One thing I have noticed (and which everyone else comments upon) is that in the good old days, people were better geologists - all you have to do is read the old exploration reports, they are a gold mine. Yeah, it's true, but have you ever wondered why?

Statutory exploration reporting (annual or otherwise) is an integral part of the foundation of pre-competitive geoscientific data. The requirement to disclose data about exploration, over time, results in a significant database upon which new entrants into the market can draw in order to de-risk exploration.

Modern jurisdictions with compulsory statutory reporting of mineral exploration activities will generally be adroit at ferreting out hard data (assays, locations, drill logs to some extent) created via the mineral explorer. However, soft data - contextual, textual, observational and image data - is just as valuable to exploration. The generation and capture of such soft data is not strictly required by the statutory reporting schemes and is often one of the most valuable things collected.

This screed is not about hard databut about capturing soft data and reporting it properly via an Annual Report. Here, I mean an actual report written by a geologist.

To illustrate this issue I will first discuss philosophical issues around compulsory reporting, the problems with reporting of soft data, what and how to report, and how to write a report that is meaningful to future generations of geoscientists and explorationists.

The philosophical conundrum

Exploration reporting is a collective impost on active explorers which benefits all explorers (big, small and artisanal) in proportion to the effort which they invest in collating, mining and analysing the data. It costs the explorer to contribute, and does not benefit them, and is in a way similar to a tax.

As an aside, it is worth discussing the tax-like nature of statutory reporting schema briefly, because like a tax, the benefits are shared by entities external to the taxed entity, with benefits accruing at a later date, and can seem to be an onerous impost that should be reduced. The instinct to reduce one's statutory reporting impost is natural; it is a direct financial cost to a mineral exploration business which also adversely benefits one's future competition. Under hyper-capitalist and ultra-libertarian philosophies this should be avoided assiduously in order to preserve one's private data advantage and wider competitive advantage. This leads to shoddy, slip-shod or incomplete disclosures of annual reporting activities as a conscious business policy.

This philosophical mindset is misguided on several fronts, especially by junior explorers. These companies will likely (almost certainly) not be around after the 5 year confidentiality moratorium and, based on my experience, companies with low to no employees, low-to-no data integrity, and very poor managerial capacity will likely not, in fact, maintain their own data silo and competitive advantage by losing key personnel and entire databases. Therefore, it is in their interest to fully and comprehensively report all activity.

Problems with Reporting

The first problem with proper reporting of soft data is the cost of report writing, which drives companies to under-report. For textual reports, the cost factor involves the time required to sit down and write a report, which could be significant.

For a tenement without much going on, the first annual report of its term is probably a handful of days to properly put together, or two days to do a basic job. This cost increases marginally as the activity increases, because the job of writing the report is proportional more to the number of activities undertaken versus how much of that activity is undertaken; writing a paragraph of text to describe your 50 sample soils programme is equal to that required for a 5,000 sample programme (roughly). Doing soils, streams, rocks, geophysics, drilling, mapping, surveying....each requires at least a paragraph and so the complexity and time required increases.

Secondly, maps are required. Maps should be drafted properly, which is often not done anymore, resulting in poor reports with illegible, useless or unintelligible maps. Drafting a proper map in the era of QGIS-at-best is almost a lost skill set, and a real problem. Of course, the advent of strict co-ordinate system formats and data formats assists in reducing the impact of poorly drafted maps (the reader can just suck the data into their own database and generate maps themselves) but, really, there has to be some pride left to at least depict the activity accurately. This is especially true of geological maps.

Another problem which is harder to avoid is that annual reporting is often a boring cost instead of an exciting expenditure. By this I mean it is to be avoided, minimised and put off until too late, versus done early and properly. This sees annual reporting done in a minimalist way, as quickly as possible, and often by junior of office-based lower paid part-time professionals (or indeed, non-professionals) in the head office.

Finally, the mode of reporting your results is often a problem. Here I refer to whether you have a widget or online form you fill out to meet the requirements of the jurisdiction into which you report, and the mechanics of using it. Web-based forms tend to not be conducive to elegance in your response, which adversely affects the overall legibility, completeness and coherency of the report at the end.

Proper Reporting

Given the fact each jurisdiction has its own requirements, formats and style guides for what to report and how to report it, I won't prescribe the list of headings here. Obviously one has to comply with the law in terms of statutory reporting (ie; you report as per the statute or requirements of the law). Meeting the minimum standards, if not exceeding them, should be the goal of any of these reports.

However, my peeves with the minimalism system stem from a bleeding obvious reduction in legibility and utility of annual reports in my jurisdiction (Western Australia) since the advent of online form-based reporting instead of submission of actual documents, PDF's or hard copies. Of course, a form-based system ensures uniformity of output, which ensures compatibility, uniformity and availability of the data in the online world, which is a decided advantage. However, filling in disjointed headings in a form result in terrible legibility, coherency and completeness of the information, how it is displayed, and even the amount of information that authors feel comfortable to submit.

Going beyond this, annual reports should do several things beyond merely describing in perfunctory minimum detail a list of activities undertaken. The text of the report should contain the soft data - the intangibles of the efforts.

Describe the objective of the exploration efforts: the why of the efforts. Of course there are those who would say it's cunning to conceal why one was exploring the tenement in the first place, to keep the exploration rationale secret, preserve the IP and competitive advantage of the company for as long as possible. This is a fair comment, but it is also fair to say that if one has picked up the tenement to explore it based on some wonk's theory, you have done your darnedest to explore it, and the reason you are relinquishing it is because you have failed to find an economic discovery, you should be honest and admit your model and failure to sustain that model. Therefore, there is no competitive advantage because if you've done your job properly no ore should exist on the tenement and you've proved it to your financial capacity to do so. If you merely ran out of money, well, are you really going to get back in and convince some other investors to have a crack? If they do, well, good on them.

Describe the methods of exploration - the how of the efforts. This is more than just "Yo, we filled 500 bags with sand". Yeah, we can figure that out from the metadata in the attachments, champ. Describe difficulties you encountered - topography, weather, lack of the appropriate sample media, etcetera. Discuss why you chose the assay methodology, sample size fractions, etcetera. Remember, this is for you as much as anyone else - perhaps you return to the project 30 years hence and realise "Haha, sand, what a poor choice, should have used lag instead of sand!" - bingo, the soft data comes to the fore. Or, maybe it was defensible, and you don't look like a dill for sampling sand.

Describe the topography and access - the where. Decades may pass, roads may be improved, opening up different areas to traversing, or may decay and become disused, hidden but important routes in to areas on the tenement. If there's a topographical feature useful for finding a prospect, it's worth mentioning it in a description of how to access the area. Maps and GPS are great, but humans navigate just as easily by landmarks, so mentioning "From Oak Bore, travel n the fenceline to the east, take the track south from the BIF outcrop 500 metres" is more useful than a simple GPS coordinate because if that's the sensible route in, it saves people time versus thrashing themselves to bits coming at it the wrong way.

Describe the Rocks

The reason those old exploration reports are so valuable is the descriptive text on what the rocks are. Whilst today we capture data into a database with various columns and codes (and I recommend considering the Capture Codes system for rock chips) for drill holes and sometimes rock chip sampling, it is only in the old reports that we get properly described rocks. Rock description is often an art form to turn a rock code (say, Ag for an Archaean granite) into something that you can read, visit the outcrop, and understand as a desciption of the rock unit.

Describing a rock requires skills in observation and writing. Writing things down is the cornerstone of science. Whilst databases used to run solely on codes and shorthand, the capability of Optical Character Recognition to scrape even PDF's of text, convert it digitally, and then scrape the whole WAMEX archive of text matches for mineral key words (for instance) really drags the whole process around full circle. It is not longer acceptable, in my opinion, to just assume that a drill log code system can capture everything.

When it is time to write the annual report, or at least one presumes a sub-report within the appendices of the report, it is time to actually describe the rocks, regolith, geomorphology and all the observational attributes perceptible to oneself. I have written on the subject of observational skills in geology previously. - take the time to ensure your reader understands not just that is a granite, but the appearance, mineralogy, texture, alteration and structure.

Value-In-Text

Recently the advances in text-reading Optical Character Recognition has torn back the veil of labour required to read scanned documents of the pre-digital age. OCR of the entire WAMEX database has allowed computers to convert scanned typewritten reports from decades ago into searchable digital format documents that can be searched for words and phrases. This has opened up a trove of documents full of textural descriptions of geology, alteration, and mineralogy.

This is a one shot phenomena, perhaps to be added to by AI relational neural networks able to synthesise these soft text clues into regional pictures of mineral assemblages etc, and form models of the soft data environment of the reported geology, and derive context required for exploration theories.

For example, searching for individual minerals (eg; "spodumene") within the text of PDF reports unearths specific mineralisation not noted in existing databases ("lithium caesium tantalum associated pegmatite here") which generates targets to test. This process obviously relies upon these text descriptors being put into a report. However, it is clear that the current poor reporting behaviour is reducing the utility of this tool simply because if you don't describe your geology correctly in textual form then no one can search your PDF document for the words required to return a search.

This carries through to descriptions of alteration assemblages. One ameliorating factor is that a lot of hyperspectral and infrared spectroscopy is performed by consultancies which tend to deliver a report describing the mineral species, which can assist in capturing information in searchable format. Again, one should describe results in the actual report, not leave them mouldering in a report in an appendix.

One of the important parts of an annual report is the coherence of the whole report. The problem with filling bixes in an online form is that the whole report is carved up into small ticky-box segments where one tends to address the specific part of the report without addressing the whole. This leads to a can of dogfood result. Your university professors wouldn't let you do this (not yet anyway) so it is up to you, as a professional (or not) to carry forward your science into the reporting, interpretation and conclusions parts of the whole exercise.

The Manager's Job?

If one peruses the authors of most annual reports on the WAMEX system, there are a lot of names which never appear on a drill log. This is because annual reporting and compliance are seen as back-office or office-based roles. Being office based, as a geologist, tends to favour several segments of the population: women, women with families, people with health issues or disabilities, junior staff, people with very little real geological skills, or non-geologists such as database managers, tenement managers with more of a legal bent, etcetera.

The fact that 'back office' staff must do the work of compiling statutory reports does not denigrate their skills in geology, but it does raise a question. Should someone who has never been to sitebe writing about what has occurred on site? Indeed, how can they authoritatively describe what has happened if they have never left the office?

It is arguable that the information should be collated, after people who have done the work have properly documented it and presented the information to the report writer. This would be an ideal situation, but reality is often different.

A Semi-Lost Skill

This leads me to the main thrust of the article, which is that standards are slipping if everyone recognises that old practitioners wrote reports with far more valuable information in them in terms of quality of work, descriptions and completeness of what was reported.

Whilst the format of the portals we currently have to engage with online is not the best for it, and work practises, demarcation of responsibilities within the businesses and time and budget constraints all reduce the amount of resources able to be devoted to annual reporting, it is worth persisting with doing quality work.

It is also worth pointing out that skill as a geologist isn't all about manipulating 3D isosurfaces, performing advanced statistical convolutions on geochemistry datasets, or being able to log the most metres of core per shift (all valuable in their time and place). It isn't all about steady, methodical logic and structuring thought, data and forming 4D models of deep space-time to predict mineralisation.

One major part of geology, which is a descriptive science, is describing rocks. This is the most basic thing a geologist does. Observations are the foundation of geology - but an observation that isn't written down in text is wasted effort. Looking at something and not writing something down is bad geology.

Similar to the old adage - if you cant describe something in simple terms you don't understand it - the same is true of geology. If you can't describe your geology in simple, plain text, you don't understand it. it's worth thinking about that next time you have a project review meeting.

Finally, one prosaic reason is that you will get a job from it when, years after the fact, it turns out you are the only person who has written down anything coherent about the geology. You're probably not the only person, or the smartest person, to ever work in an area, but words written on a page (or a PDF, let's be honest) endure. They are meant to endure. If it worked for Plato, it can work for you.