1a You are considering a soil sampling campaign in a remote area for a new deposit. You plan on sampling 100 soil location for this phase of your exploration strategy. The cost to assay the samples involves transportation rates of $0.10/mile for each box of 10 samples. There are two labs that can assay the samples. Lab A has a fee of $200 per assay and is 500 miles away. Lab B has a fee of $160 per assay and is located 3,000 miles away.
2. Which lab (Lab A or Lab B) should you use if you want to double your sampling (200 samples instead of 100)? Why?
1b) Your first 100 soil samples yielded some interesting results along with some unique challenges. It turns out you might need to lot more sampling! You have an industry contact that says he can build a lab on site for your company. He is asking only $60,000 for the lab shack (including solar panels that can power the equipment). The lab equipment costs $200,000. You have someone in your company that can do the lab assay work at no additional cost to the company and certify the results as part of his salaried role.
1C) You decided to build the sample shack and your soil sampling led to the discovery of a very homogenous outcrop that has how been uncovered and trenched. Atmospheric conditions of the shack are 110 °F and 1 atm (too bad you didn`t have the money for A/C!). You decide to make use of a drum for a bulk density measurement using the Archimedes method. You carefully weight 4.00 t of hard rock taken from your trench and add it to the drum. The mass displaces 1.70 m3 of water.
1d Aerial photogrammetry from a commercial drone pilot calculates the volume of the exposed outcrop from your trenching to be 1 km in length, 50 m in width and 2 m in depth. The average grade of the ore is 32% Mn and 20% Fe.