“I’m one of the eight geologists employed by Erdenes Mongol, Mongolia’s state-owned mining company. Since May last year, I’ve been working at both our headquarters in Ulaanbaatar and at the Asgat silver deposit project, which is more than 1,000 kilometres away, in the Altai Mountains in northwestern Mongolia. It’s the most remote mine in the country and some sections reach 3,000 metres above sea level.
We stop visiting the mine in November because the conditions there become unsurvivable: temperatures can drop below –45 °C.
In this photo, I’m inspecting a planned drilling site in the silver–copper mineralization zone — the area where these metals form geologically. I’m about 750 metres into one of the mine’s 2 kilometres of tunnels. We’re still at the exploratory stage, but we think that the ore body for this site contains around 2,200 tonnes of silver, which would make it one of the world’s richest deposits.