Careers in Mineral Exploration

You mop your forehead as sweat drips down your brow, sighing gratefully as the blazing sun hides mercifully behind a cloud. You look across the quiet desert valley, bathed in a shadow that won't last. Some would say that the days of treasure seekers are long over, but you know that's not the case. Somewhere under the ground is a deposit of immense wealth. You just need to find it.

Christopher Ballard gave his presentation to the geology department on October 23, 2025. Chris is a mineral exploration geologist for Rio Tinto, a global mining company, and does much of his work in Utah and Idaho. He graduated from Utah State University with a bachelor's degree in geology. Ballard was hired straight out of college, with only a bachelor's degree. He said that in his field of work, what you can do is much more important than how much schooling you have. Breaking into the field is the tricky part, but it is definitely possible to find careers in mineral exploration without going onto graduate school. He presented on careers in mineral exploration and detailed his own experiences and work throughout his career.

It goes without saying that before you can do any kind of mining, you have to find where to dig first. Ballard explained that his role is to do just that: identify deposits of minerals that can be successfully mined and extracted. Rio Tinto sends mineral exploration geologists such as Ballard all over the world, where they may spend up to two weeks at a time attempting to evaluate the local geology and look for potential dig sites. New drilling locations are classified as greenfields, but geologists may also be sent to evaluate brownfields, which are sites that have already been excavated or worked with in some way. These typically include either old mines or current mines where there may be cause to expand. Ballard estimates that he spends as much as sixty percent of his time working in the field. The rest of his time is spent in the lab, evaluating collected samples and creating models of what they find.

Exploration geologists use many tools and methods to help them locate and evaluate mineral deposits. Copper deposits often form alongside magnetic materials. By utilizing instruments that use geophysics, such as magnetometers and gravimeters, these materials can be located much easier. Portable XRF spectrometers are used to define the elemental composition of samples, while geologists employ geochemistry to classify the mineral composition of collected samples. Often, even when copper is not found within a sample, other metals that form near porphyry copper deposits, like zinc, are detected, hinting at the potential for copper. Once enough samples are collected, 3D models are created, modeling many of the important geological structures such as ore grade, specific structures, and mineral veins. These help companies such as Rio Tinto evaluate whether a site is worth mining.

Once a site is deemed suitable for mining, numerous steps must be taken before extraction can take place. The process is often long and tedious, usually involving years of acquiring permits and permissions from various groups. Only about one in one hundred potential mines is successful. This makes exploration geology that much more important, because they have to find hundreds of potential mining sites in order to keep future mining operations open.

For Ballard, every outing is an adventure. You might see him trekking through the arid desert on a hot summer day, looking down at valleys from high above. Or he might be fighting through a freezing blizzard, attempting to record the stratigraphy of a rock wall. Sometimes trees and other obstacles block his path, and often the places that he goes to are only accessible by helicopter. The results of Ballard's work are all around us. Our technology, our roads, our buildings, are all thanks to mining.