appraisal of tas's prospects by geo from rusia

This has been just posted on SS-v.interesting:

Next. About Tasman and your colleague's comment.
Interesting story and comment of your colleague appears to be right.
There is one thing in general that makes me more accurate in assessment of potential of such discoveries. Commonly we have lognormal distribution of reserves of deposits which belongs to the same mineralization type. In other words if you will plot a histogram for deposit's size you will see that distribution curve will never be similar with simple "bell" curve, but it will be asymmetrical with main portion of deposits within small-medium class and with few in larger classes, and with one or two outstanding jumps to very high amount of reserves. Most bright examples are gold bearing conglomerates of South Africa that yield might by 40 % of total gold in the world, after we have Tarkva and Jakobina (I do not remember right spelling) conglomerate deposits in Africa and Brazil with total reserves in few hundreds tons of gold (and might be something else in the vicinities in addition), and no other gold ore in conglomerates, only hundreds of small anomalies, and dreams of generations of geologists to discover new Rand in conglomerates...
Epithermal silver-gold. More or less the same. Might be 2-3 deposits larger 1000 tons of gold, nearly 15 more than 100 tons, hundreds more than 10, thousands below 10 tons, and uncounted amount of prospects less than 1 ton.
If a geologist came up with discovery of some prospect with known mineralization style commonly it means that this prospect belongs to the smallest size class. Most simple formula will sounds something like: Rand (or Norilsk+Talnakh for example) is one and will stay one but prospects of this type will be abundant.
With Olimpic Dam (OD) there is good feature that it is relatively new type mineralization with only few known similar deposits. In such case statistical approaches are not working. So up to now a chance exist to discover a new deposit in size of two OD even in unconnected fault system.
It remind me Norilsk story. In 1920-1940 Norilsk 1 and 2 were discovered and developed, and only in 1959-1964 amazing Talnakh was discovered. And Talnakh occur in another structure and another intrusion then Norilsk 1&2.
So...
As a geologist I'd like to tell that Tasman discovery makes me inspired.