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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 11:12:59 :
In Reply to: O T helicopters and mining posted by copey on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 05:05:13 :
Prospectors have been using aerial magnetic and gravity surveys for probably 50 years, so it's unlikely there's anything new to find that way in a well-explored part of the world. Those methods will only find massive deposits, and even then they just provide a bit of a hint for where to start looking on the ground.
I've seen newer "high-tech" methods in use around here and neither one impressed me. A few years ago there was an outfit that opened a new placer gold mine up near Murray that claimed they'd used some sort of satellite technology to measure exactly how deep the bedrock was everywhere on their property. Every bit of equipment at their mine was brand new, from a state of the art pre-fabricated wash plant that was supposed to extract the finest flour gold to a fancy articulated dump truck, and right on down to the welding sets. That caught my attention because real small-time miners are masters at re-using and cobbling together old equipment. Not only that but they were paying the highest wages in the area. After a few months of operation and no gold coming out of the machine and paychecks for the workers, the "mine" shut down and all the leased equipment was returned. I think it was just a stock-selling scam and they used the "satellite" angle to help them peddle stock.
In the other case, they hired a Canadian outfit called "Quantec Geoscience" to do something they call "induced polarization" studies, which involves laying out wires on the ground, putting out some kind of electrical signal and measuring what comes back (not radar and not a normal metal detector, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to work). They produced impressive looking multi-colored plots that the mine promoter said indicated ore bodies within 1000' of the surface. Once he started diamond drilling, he did find good ore, but it was 7000' down, way below the range of the induced polarization. I'm not sure that method was a fraud, but I'm not very impressed with it either.
As for the law and claim staking, I'm pretty sure you're misinformed about others being able to claim minerals on your land. Canadian law is a bit different from US law, but I'm pretty sure that if you have clear title to your land, you automatically have the mineral rights too. Claims can only be filed on crown land, just as they can only be filed on BLM or USFS land in the US. At least in the old days, Canadian law actually imposed more requirements in terms of cleanup and actually working the mine than US law did, and I don't know that miners ever could patent (get clear title to) mineral claims in Canada.
What might have happened in the case of the neighbor's torn-up ground is that some outfit already owned the mineral rights from years ago. In a lot of the coal country in the US, farmers long ago sold their mineral rights to mining companies or investors. The farmers figured all they needed of the ground was the surface for their cattle or their crops, and if somebody wanted to pay them to possibly someday mine coal that may or may not be underneath it, that was cash today that they could use. 50 or 100 years goes by and now here comes the big walking dragline shovel to turn their land upside down and get the coal out from under it.
At least in this country, there's no way to "claim" the minerals that are under your land. If some previous owner sold them to somebody else, you'd have to buy them back from the current owner, whereas if nobody ever sold them, they transfer automatically via a regular deed. Same goes with timber rights. Water rights are different, and never go with the land unless they're explicitly transferred. The trouble is that title companies don't guarantee mineral rights, and it's hard to figure out if someone else owns them. At least in the American west, most private land titles originated via the homestead act (for farms), railroad land grants, patented mining claims, and the timber and stone act. Of all of these, only the railroad land grants imposed any conditions or limitations on the grantee, once a title ("patent") was granted, and court rulings have essentially nullified even the limitations on the railroad grants. From that point on in history, any rights that have been separated from the land were separated due to some owner explicitly selling them.
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