The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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Original computer semiconductor now energizes space ambitions. Germanium is a versatile and powerful semiconductor that traces its technology roots back to the dawn of the Digital Age and continues to lend its superlative semiconducting and optical properties to enhancing computers, smartphones, solar panels, fiber optics, and other devices 80 years later. In 1945, Sylvania introduced the first germanium diode to enhance the vacuum tube computers that launched the Digital...
From rocket engines to lunar habitats, 3D printing is revolutionizing aerospace, turning dreams into reality. In the not-so-distant past, the idea of constructing a rocket engine or spacecraft components with just the click of a button seemed like pure science fiction. Yet today, 3D printing is rapidly transforming the aerospace industry, turning once-impossible designs into tangible reality, and bringing us closer to the stars than ever before. Aerospace has always been on th...
Undertake an adventure through the riveting tale of Nellie Cashman, perhaps one of the most inspiring women of the 18th century. Perhaps no other individual could be regarded as true an American pioneer as Irish immigrant Ellen "Nellie" Cashman. Easily regarded as a quintessential gold mining stampeder with her acumen in business and the nose to sniff out opportunity, she traveled the width and breadth of America, leaving success and hope in her wake. Known as the Angel of...
Discovering Alaska's hidden wealth, the journey of Indigenous explorers in the land of platinum, Goodnews Bay Mining District. In the heart of Alaska's wilderness, two Alaska Native men stamped their names in state history with the discovery of the largest platinum deposit ever found in the Last Frontier. Both born into Yup'ik heritage, the journey of Walter Smith and Henry Wuya begins with early prospecting as little more than teenagers, to the landmark 1926 discovery on the...
The more than 34,000 meters of drilling carried out last year at Golddigger significantly increased the size and grade of two already identified zones – Surebet and Bonanza Shear – and added the new Golden Gate Zone to the stacked vein systems on Goliath Resources Ltd.'s emerging world-class gold-silver project about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southeast of Stewart, British Columbia. "After only three drilling seasons and only 12 months in aggregate of boots on the ground, our...
After establishing its position as a leading zinc-lead-silver explorer in northern Canada, Fireweed Metals Corp. set out in late 2022 to broaden its focus in both geography and commodities. Partly defying the age-old adage to stick to what you know, the longtime explorer of the district-scale Macmillan Pass zinc-lead-silver project ventured across the border into Northwest Territories to acquire two projects. While the Gayna River zinc-lead-silver-gallium-germanium project is...
As the White House continues to dole out hundreds of billions of dollars to position America as the global leader in clean energy and digital technologies, Beijing initiates a strategy to put America in check with the global economy equivalent of pawns. These pawns in the technology chess match between the U.S. and China are gallium and germanium, a pair of semiconductor metals used to make the computer chips essential to every facet of modern life. Before all the major news o...
NIKOLAI, ALASKA – Alaska Energy Metals Corp. President and CEO Greg Beischer has returned to finish what he started when he first landed in Alaska as a young geologist for INCO Ltd. in 1995 – outline a world-class nickel deposit at Nikolai, a project that lies on the northern margins of an energy metals enriched geological terrane that arcs across the 49th State. "Alaska Energy Metals is positioning itself to supply domestic markets with a source of critical and strategic met...
Separating your plastics, paper, metals, and food waste has generally been a personal choice throughout most of modern recycling history. However, current demand for resources predicts we won't have enough to support net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Hence, now is the best time for consumers to become educated and self-determined with their buying power, manufacturers to begin considering recycling as part of the initial design, and a new circular economy that resurrects a tr...
For those in the know, Alaska's resources aren't just some surprise windfall for renewable energy technologies. While precious metals like gold and silver have been the primary focus of more than a century of mining up north, the 49th State is home to 49 of the 50 materials on the United States' critical minerals list and has a history of stepping up to the plate to provide America with critical minerals when they are needed the most. Looking ahead over the next two to three...
The world's leading mining companies have a big problem – with the industry being transformed by a mad rush to acquire raw materials supporting the worldwide energy transition, and mining companies' sweeping moves to drastically reduce their own carbon footprints, the future of labor is becoming more of a hybrid of specialized technical skillsets and traditional experience. Just as the average miner no longer counts a pick and shovel among his toolkit, the miner of today w...
PhotonAssay tech offers a modern, faster alternative to fire assaying for gold analysis. Assays are the very crux of mineral exploration – timely results returned from the lab help guide the search for orebodies and let investors know that the dollars being poured into drilling and sampling is money well spent. With assay lab turnaround times in a post-COVID world being measured in months instead of weeks, mineral exploration geologists are without an important tool for v...
The magnitude of metals' role in humanity is made evident through the names of its ages – Stone, Bronze, and Iron – before the loftier eras that sought more esoteric meaning to life than mere survival. Yet, somewhat contrary to the ages of reason and learning, metal was still prevalent in maintaining the status quo for Mankind, and in perhaps the greatest of ironies, the method to test, extract, and refine metal came from the most primitive of gifts from the time earliest man...
From antimony historically mined near the Interior Alaska city of Fairbanks to the zinc and germanium produced at the Red Dog Mine, America's 49th State is a past producer, and a potential future source of the minerals and metals deemed critical to the United States. Earlier this year U.S. Geological Survey updated and expanded its list of critical minerals to include 50 minerals and metals essential to the economic or national security of the U.S. and which has a supply...
Coming together to build North America's clean energy and e-mobility future The shift away from the fossil fuels that powered the Industrial Revolution and transported humankind through the 20th century, and toward the clean energy technologies that will propel us into the future, has the world at an inflection point – the decisions we make on how to supply, use, and recycle the minerals and metals that are the basic building blocks of the Renewable Energy Revolution will s...
From flashlights to supercomputers, tin is the glue for an electronic age Lost in the clamor for lithium, nickel and other metals needed for the batteries powering electric vehicles and modern electronics, or the rare earth elements that turn stored energy into motion, is the enormous need for a much more modest metal that is so fundamental to the advancement of technology that it almost goes unseen – tin. While other technology metals are critical to certain products and s...
Unlike the European prospectors seeking the gold, silver, copper, and the New World's wealth of other metals, oftentimes First Nations, Native Americans, and Indigenous peoples throughout North America sought a different rock that was precious to their very survival, obsidian. From as far north as the Gates of the Arctic national park to as far south as the Gulf of California, and even eastward and at the bottom of the Great Lakes, this microscopically sharp volcanic rock has...
I know, I know, I promised to shut up and go away a long time ago. But I lied, so sue me! Just be glad I didn't title this ramble "Is it time for Format-C?" after all, most of the young-uns would have to Google that term to see what in tarnation it meant! And even then, many would ask "what is a hard drive?" But I digress, which by the way, has a Latin derivation that means "step away," which I supposedly did some time ago (see above). Ironic, eh? But I am digressing about...
It all began in 1991, when geologists Charles E. Fipke and Stewart Blusson found 81 small diamonds at Lac de Gras in Northwest Territories, Canada, marking the first diamond pipe discovery in North America. While this groundbreaking discovery is often synonymous with the name Chuck Fipke – as it was the culmination of his relentless pursuit of elusive diamond indicator minerals for hundreds of kilometers from the Mackenzie River Valley eastward to their source near Lac de G...
Engage. Connect. Evolve. – this theme of AME Roundup 2022 is the perfect reflection of a mineral exploration sector that is adapting to a world in which Zoom meetings and webinars must often replace boardroom meetings and live conferences as a means of engaging investors, shareholders, and stakeholders. "As society recovers and evolves from the disruption caused by the global pandemic, so does our industry," said AME President and CEO Kendra Johnston. "At AME Roundup, you w...
Goldman Sachs' declaration that "copper is the new oil" may serve as a foreshadowing of Alaska's economic future, one that is not so heavily reliant on the revenues from petroleum flowing from the North Slope and leans more heavily on the state's rich endowment of precious, critical, and base metals. The investment bank's suggestion that copper is to become the strategically most important commodity on Earth is due to the vital role the conductive metal plays in global...
As an Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act regional corporation that is balancing traditional values with economic opportunities across a 26-million-acre picturesque and resource-rich traditional region at the epicenter of Alaska's highway system, Ahtna Inc. lies at a literal and figurative crossroads. Bordered by the majestic Alaska Range to the north, the equally beautiful Chugach Mountains to the south, the Canadian border to the east, and the Denali National Park to the...
With such incredible technologies at mankind's disposal today, it is easily forgotten the ingenuity and sheer gumption that our predecessors brought to solving some of the more rigorous and demanding jobs that construed early development. The ever-present wheel, hand tools, weaponry, and beyond, the plethora of devices humanity has created, only expanded into breathtaking and mind-numbing concepts our forebearers could never fathom. Areas such as animal husbandry, agriculture,...
While the history of human innovation is a series of discoveries, each building on the last, there are certain "eureka moments" that mark a shift in the trajectory of mankind – taming fire, stone toolmaking, Bronze Age metalworking, the printing press, and harnessing electricity to name a few. The history books may one day reflect on these opening decades of the 21st century as one of those rare occasions that human innovation makes a leap that necessitates a new chapter be w...
New Age Metals Inc. Sept. 20 reported that Aurora Geosciences Ltd. is carrying out mapping and sampling at the Bernard Mountain and Sheep Hill areas of New Age's Genesis platinum group metal-nickel-copper project in Southcentral Alaska. Lying alongside the Richardson Highway about 75 highway miles north of the deep-water port city of Valdez, Genesis is an under-explored palladium-platinum-nickel-copper property with great infrastructure. Previous sampling at Sheep Hill, one...
