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134 17 Ataspaca Prospect Tom, 1988 Tom Horning shut off the slide projector and sat down at the stained and dusty table at the front of the geology lab. He glanced over his shoulder, cringed slightly at the clock over the door: he’d run almost twenty minutes over the half hour scheduled for his thesis defense. Par for the course. A copy of his master’s thesis sat on the table next to him: 402 pages, not counting the maps he’d stayed up late coloring the night before. “The Geology, Igneous Petrology, and Mineral Deposits of the Ataspaca Mining District, Department of Tacna, Peru.” Five pounds of paper, 1¾ inches thick. Seven years of his life, collated and comb-bound with a black plastic spine. In front of him, across the table, sat his committee of three faculty members. Beyond them, crowded around the room’s other two long lab tables, was his cheering section: twenty or so friends plus his sister Judy, down from Portland. Behind them, at the back of the room, ran one long, horizontal window that seemed to suck light rather than cast it into the daylight basement lab that dreary January afternoon. All Tom could see was a dark slope of muddy ground and the round, gray grid of a manhole cover. He wished he could have spent a couple more days refining his talk. But he’d already delayed his thesis defense several times. No one knew its shortcomings better than Tom himself. But sitting there, looking at the faces of his committee members, he granted himself a moment of satisfaction. It was clear from their expressions that he had blown them away. The Ataspaca prospect, where he’d done his research, sat at nearly 13,000 feet elevation on the west flank of the Cordillera Occidental in Peru’s southern Andes Mountains, at the edge of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. Every day of the thirty-four days he spent at Ataspaca, Tom and a fellow grad student from Oregon State would leave their boarding house twelve miles outside the town of Tacna and drive an hour and a half up into the mountains, hugging the cliffs and rounding the hairpin turns above steep ravines cradling the glittering remains of vehicles that had failed to negotiate those curves. Hardly anything—plants, animals, ataspaca prospect 135 people—lived on those high, arid hillsides. Nearing Ataspaca, the road dropped into a canyon where snowmelt from the glaciated volcanoes above allowed subsistence farmers to eke out a living raising alpacas in small adobe corrals and growing beans in terraced, irrigated fields. The study site itself was rugged and rocky and cut by deep canyons. What vegetation there was on the prospect was limited mostly to cacti, hardy grasses, and a few low shrubs able to survive without much warmth or water. The sun shone nearly every day, though the wind, blowing off the fields of snow and ice at the summit of the Cordillera just above Ataspaca, could be biting. Tom spent his days mostly hunched over, scrutinizing every inch of his two-squarekilometer study site. Around noon he would put down his hammer and pick and straighten up, stretching his back. Then he’d settle himself on one rock pile or another and unwrap the sandwich the boarding house had packed for him—a hot dog, sliced lengthwise, between two pieces of brown bread smeared with a thin sheen of mustard—and eat it while gazing at distant snow-capped volcanoes framed by a startling blue sky. If Tom didn’t eat his sandwich within two or three minutes of unwrapping the waxed paper, the bread would be dry as a cracker. By the end of that summer, Tom had felt as desiccated as his sandwich. Tom had been aiming at a master’s degree in economic geology—the geology of ore bodies that can be extracted from the earth for profit. In short, prospecting. The state-owned mining company Centromin Peru had been digging exploration tunnels at Ataspaca and had started work on an office-and-lodging facility—tangible evidence of Centromin’s high hopes for the site. Geologists had already recognized that the mineralization at the Ataspaca prospect was hosted by skarns: metamorphic rocks produced when hot water deep in the earth facilitates an exchange of calcium and other elements between rocks in different parts of the ore system, creating new minerals such as red garnet and...

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