Wotthe, BSc Hons from QU+5 years experience, including iron ore,...

Wotthe,

BSc Hons from QU
+5 years experience, including iron ore, nickel, copper, zinc, lead and gold
...and I'd tell you which deposit I helped find which was announced recently, but you'd have to be really naive to post about who you actually work for online. Also, no exploration success is ever the sole work of one guy so I can't claim I've found anything by myself at all. If any geo did, they'd be a bunghole not worthy of their hubris.

However, I have been involved with the discovery of a zinc-lead deposit recently, a nickel deposit a couple of years ago, and worked for a company which found a small gold deposit. The success of a geologist isn't always down to the deposits they found - but often how much they added to something some other guys drilled 30 years ago. Being realistic there are very, very few areas in Australia which haven't been picked over before.

I can't claim to have such a heady history as Big Kev, who has a wealth of experience as big as the wheelbarrow full of MXRO's and MXROA's he's pushing uphill to exercise, but I'm also not the MD of a company who is bound by a code of conduct and so on and so forth which he is very carefully trying to tiptoe around as much as possible with Exploration Targets as he can in order to make some possibly defensible claims of masses and masses of iron.

However, simply by repeating a qualifying statement 1,000,000 times does not mean that the 3 billion tonnes of magnetite he may or may not find is suitable to talk about and dangl in front of investors. So I'll call cow caca when I see it.

In my opinion, Kev should try to use less geology to define his targets and try to use more drilling to turn them into resources. Taking a leaf from AGO's book, he'll be able to define 800Mt of magnetite within 3 months. Or even less. But saing you've got it (qualified) by using gravity, magnetic susceptibility (otherwise known as Mag Sus, or Sus Mag), broken density mass-balance equations ahead of chemical analyses...these are all skating as close as possible to the edge of the JORC code ice as Big Kev can achieve with careful grammar and English.

In the end, you have to ask yourself - do you understand the science behind the claim?

How reasonable is the claim? Can you replicate the estimated tonnages given the data, or must you simply rely on "expert" knowledge, second-party assurances and non-peer reviewed and non-independently verified opinions?

Is the reason you are investing based on accepting scientific arguments you do not perfectly understand?

Is the claim backed up by the evidence - how well is it backed up by it?

I think I would tend to agree MXR can prove they have 3 billion tonnes of dense rock. Gravity is not an imprecise science. The assumptions made about the density of the rocks used to create the model used in the estimate, however, is very imprecise.

Will this dense rock average 23% Fe or 46% Fe? Consider the head grade of a deposit is not the same as the concentrate grade. From the data supplied, one would tend to think it is actually 23% Fe head grade - composed of 40% magnetite grading 58% Fe, plus 20% ilmenite grading 46% Ti, plus 20% silicates. This is different from 40% Fe head grade.

And also, I ask you this: how much will it cost MXR to complete their 800m stratigraphic diamond hole? At $200 a metre (typical for diamond costs), this hole may prove the gravity model is fairly OK, but it's a very expensive way to go about finding 200m of 23% Fe at 350m depth.