Some interesting comments from Brent Cook:

TGR: How do you determine the difference between an anomaly and an economic deposit?

BC: That is the hard part. That takes tens of millions of dollars and is what a feasibility study is all about.

Explorers run around the world, finding and evaluating anomalies. The earth has been evolving and changing over its 4.6 billion year history. As it changes, those changes are reflected in geochemical and geophysical anomalies. A volcano blows up and washes away, hot springs come from a cooling magma and change a hard rock to clay; that process happens all the time and creates geochemical anomalies. Maybe one in one thousand of those geochemical anomalies might reflect an economic deposit.

Determining which is a deposit requires going through the feasibility study process, looking at metallurgy, infrastructure, rock mechanics, at everything that goes into building a mine. We really try to turn an anomaly into an ore deposit through detailed studies that cost a lot of money.