This beautifully presented course manual supporting Snowden Mining Industry Consultants renowned course in Resource Estimation represents the culmination of more than 20 years of course refinements, revisions, improvements and further refinements. No doubt the manual will continue to be improved in the future as new information becomes available and new techniques are introduced. After all a course manual must be a dynamic, living document that remains relevant to the mining industry. <...>

Precious and base metal mineralization has long been known to occur in the El Indio area of central Chile. This mineralization occurs as veins containing very high grade Au and Ag, which was the main target for the majority of subsequent exploration. This exploration usually employed the use of remote sensing techniques to highlight color anomalies related to hydrothermal alteration, and local prospectors and geologists to follow up these anomalies. The recent discovery of significant disseminated Au mineralization south of El Indio in both Chile and Argentina has shown that the El Indio belt of rocks is probably under explored. Exploration techniques which can detect a variety of styles of mineralization in a single pass, and which are economically viable, must be introduced to the Andean exploration community. One of these techniques is stream sediment geochemical sampling; a well used exploration method in many parts of the world, but apparently only recently used in the Andes in a systematic fashion. <...>

In the two decades since "Orthosilicates" (Reviews in Mineralogy, Vol. 5), much has been learned about the internal textures, trace-element and isotope geochemistry (both radiogenic and stable) and chemical and mechanical stability of zircon. The application of this knowledge and the use of zircon in geologic studies have become widespread. Today, the study of zircon exists as the pseudo-discipline of "zirconology" that involves materials scientists and geoscientists from across a range of sub-disciplines including stable and radiogenic isotopes, sedimentology, petrology, trace elements and experimental mineralogy. Zirconology has become an important field of research, so much so that coverage of the mineral zircon in a review volume that included zircon as one of many accessory minerals would not meet the needs or interests of the zirconology community in terms of depth or breadth of coverage.

The production of Cu-Zn from volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits in the eastern Pontides began in the early 1900s, with the exploitation of high-grade ores scattered across the district. The district still possesses economically important blind VMS and associated sulfide deposits. Careful descriptive documentation of the typical features of these VMS ores illustrated the geological characteristics that are important in identifying ore localities and can be used to define exploration targets.