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83 10 Epidote Dreams Tom, 1979 Tom’s second geology job after college was almost perfect. It was a summer job in Alaska for a big mining company whose mining claims, scattered throughout the state’s interior, had to be periodically “proved up” in order to maintain them. Every morning a helicopter would arrive to pick up Tom wherever he was staying—usually a fancy hunting lodge deep in the outback, like something from a movie. Tom and another geologist or two would climb into the helicopter, and off they’d fly to a claim block somewhere in the Alaska or Brooks Range. There he would spend the long summer day unraveling the geology from one site to the next, digging test pits or drilling holes or sampling rocks and drawing maps, looking for signs of ore that his employer could turn into money, walking many miles in the process. It was real geology, the kind he’d dreamed about: hiking around the mountains of Alaska, looking at rocks, and getting paid to do it. The malachite was the only problem. Actually Tom’s color blindness was the problem. Malachite is a mineral the green hue of bread mold or a wellwatered lawn. Malachite is also the surface clue to copper underground. Copper wasn’t the only mineral Tom was supposed to be looking for, but it was an important one, given the high copper prices of the day. His color blindness hadn’t seemed like a big problem in college. There, he could usually identify minerals by a process of elimination, or by focusing on a rock’s other qualities—its cleavage, its shape, its hardness, its habit, whether boxy or lenticular or stellated, depending on the environment where it formed. But now Tom was earning a paycheck based, in part, on his ability to notice the green rocks among the gray. Never before had he understood what a liability his color blindness would be in his chosen career as an exploration geologist, looking for sometimes subtle clues in the colors and configurations of the rocks and the lay of the land, clues pointing to where someone might be able to make a lot of money. It had become clear to Tom one day late that summer as he was hiking across a mountain slope east of Kotzebue with one of his colleagues. Under 84 The Next Tsunami their feet—not too far underground, they both knew—lay a seam of pure copper ore twenty-five to fifty feet thick, worth about $5 billion. Tom’s company was already working on the economics of extracting it. “There’s some copper,” the other guy said, pointing at the ground as he and Tom worked their way across the mountainside. “Where?” Tom asked. The other geologist looked at Tom, baffled. “Right there,” he said, stabbing a finger. Tom felt like a fool. It all looked the same color of gray, though one part looked as if some egg white had spilled on it. That was the malachite, Tom realized; he could walk right over a multibillion-dollar ore body and never even see the clues. He was even screwing up the geology maps he was drawing, color-coding certain geologic units purple when he should have used light blue; it was all the same to him until someone pointed out his mistakes. Never had he felt so incompetent. Never, that is, except on his very first geology job, the one right before this one, his first assignment with the same mining company. He had graduated from Oregon State University in March and immediately landed a job prospecting near Pioche, Nevada, near the border with Utah. Pioche, a historical mining town with “Old West charm” unsullied by commercialism, according to the chamber of commerce: Right, Tom thought, because nobody in their right mind would vacation here. He hardly spent any time in Pioche. He ate dinner and slept there, but every morning he and the crew would drive forty miles out of town to look for gold, or rather, for rocks that suggested there was gold nearby. Tom knew the how the geology worked: ore bodies are formed, usually, by hot water in volcanic rock, and that combination produced a variety of minerals: copper and molybdenum in the center of the system, lead and zinc in the halo, and gold and silver in veins out on the edges. His job was to seek the outer fringes of that system, where hydrothermal alteration...

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