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the goldwater solutions
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Gem stones are luxury items, but have little industrial or strategic value. But they are markers of metamorphic processes associated with mountain building, and newly eroded terrain which exposes these mineral bearing rocks.

I was involved in gold prospecting in the American Southwest back in the late 70s and early 80s. Highly metamorphosed rock cracked and fractured with folding and bending, allowing supersaturated mineralized hydrothermal water solutions to migrate along these faults, bringing mineral complexes near the surface. Subsequent erosional processes spread these materials into alluvial fans and playas, where they could be detected by aerial surveys using infrared spectroscopy.

My company made a major gold strike by detecting the minerals associated with gold (non-crystalline Au itself has no infrared signature). The concentrations were so low that even a trained geologist couldn't see the stuff in the field, but assayed in the lab, our samples revealed economically recoverable quantities.

I remember it well, it was the high point of my professional career. Under the direction of the geochemists that conducted the research, I wrote the software that did the statistical analysis of the IR spectral data. It was a needle-in-a-haystack problem, extracting the correlated variations of reflectivity from the noise in a tiny subset of the many spectral bands monitored by the airborn IR spectrometer.

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