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Events/Discovery · 1975

Olympic Dam drill hole RD1

Discovery, 1975, Australia.

What happened

Drill hole RD1, drilled in 1975, intersected 38 metres averaging 1.0 per cent copper between 353 and 391 metres depth.1,2

Why it matters

It led to the Olympic Dam copper-uranium-gold deposit.1,2

Story cards

Around the same time

  1. Katanga declares its secession from Congo

    The copper-rich province broke away as an unrecognised state (Wikidata date).3

  2. China agrees to fund TAZARA with US$415 million

    A tripartite agreement signed in Beijing started surveys of the line.4,5,6

  3. Zambia takes 51 percent of the copper mines

    The state became the main owner of the Copperbelt for the next 30 years.7,8,9

  4. Grasberg mine area: Wikidata inception date

    The Papua copper-gold mine is dated to 1972 in Wikidata.10

  5. Olympic Dam drill hole RD1

    It led to the Olympic Dam copper-uranium-gold deposit.1,2

  6. Escondida porphyry copper found

    Escondida became the largest copper mine in the world.11,12

  7. Privatisation of ZCCM weakens TAZARA's copper traffic

    More copper then went by road along southern routes and the Tanzam highway.4,13

  8. DRC cobalt boom

    USGS finds most artisanal cobalt was processed by Chinese firms in the DRC or exported to China.14,15,16

Open the full timeline

Where next

Mines

Located inOlympic DamSee the mine behind this story: Olympic Dam.1

Sources

  1. Report GA9508 (Olympic Dam, drill hole RD1 text) Geoscience Australia
  2. Olympic Dam mine (item Q1473809), coordinate location P625 Wikidata
  3. Wikidata item Q1148907 (State of Katanga)
  4. 'Win-win' contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa's Freedom Railway with the 'Chinese of today' Journal of Modern African Studies 59(1) (Cambridge University Press)
  5. Connective Financing: Chinese Infrastructure Projects and the Diffusion of Economic Activity in Developing Countries (Working Paper 64) AidData, William & Mary
  6. Wikidata item Q1960 (Dar es Salaam)
  7. Nationalization and Mining: Lessons from Zambia (abstract) OneMine
  8. About ZCCM-IH (history) ZCCM Investments Holdings
  9. Copperbelt Province (item Q1131523), coordinate location P625 Wikidata
  10. Wikidata item Q119297 (Grasberg Mine)
  11. La genesis de Escondida: el hallazgo que transformo la mineria chilena (opinion column by a participant) Guia Minera de Chile
  12. Escondida Mine (item Q14995147), coordinate location P625 Wikidata
  13. Wikidata item Q239580 (Kitwe)
  14. China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and artisanal cobalt mining from 2000 through 2020 (publication page) US Geological Survey
  15. China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and artisanal cobalt mining from 2000 through 2020 PNAS (S. Gulley, via Europe PMC)
  16. Kolwezi (item Q271404), coordinate location P625 Wikidata

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Pictures: Elektrisk malmletning. Undersökningar på Billiton, 1920., Okänd / Europeana (Public Domain Mark 1.0); The laboratories of Marie and Pierre Curie, Paris: room where experiments on uranium ore took place. Photograph, ca. 1900., Unknown (Wellcome Collection) (Public Domain Mark 1.0).